The weapon cooldowns in stellaris crack me up everytime I immagine the life of your average crewman.... "We have fired the gun. Good job everyone. See you in two weeks to fire again."
I've always assumed that time is faster in the game than it would be in reality too. Having a civilization go from a single homeworld to inhabiting the entire galaxy in 2-300 years seems ridiculous otherwise. So if that's the case, those crewmen might actually be taking a 2-4 month vacation between artillery shots! Seems like a great benefits package to me.
I imagine it as it takes that long to take care of all that heat produced when firing, otherwise you end up melting that weapon and/or the ship carrying it lol.
@@zacharyhollands presumably on the editing table, since he wasn't done with it yet when they released the rebalancing patch that made him have to redo parts.
Literally, every time Montu has a weapons video, a weapons rebalancing patch follows closely after. I think the Devs are glued to this channel 24/7, it is a conspiracy!
@@ChaoticNeutralMatt I usually ignore it till I have only options I wish to skip and its the cheapest option on the list, pretty much allows me to re-shuffle the cards quicker
Energy Siphons should also reduce the targets power making weapons like lasers fire slower, after burners to be less effective and shield / armour hardening to be less effective.
Another reason to use Disruptors: when a ships takes hull damage, it will have its fire rate decreased by a percentage equal to half of the percentage of Hull Points lost. By dealing damage directly to Hull in most cases, it becomes more difficult for them to fight back
That's one reason to put arc emitters on your battleships too. One of them doesn't kill the enemy but reduces their fire rate while the rest of your weapons chew through their shields and armor.
All weapons combat in this game is very situational. As mentioned in the vid, disruptors weaknesses of short range, and making an enemy more likely to retreat rather than be destroyed because of the low damage, are terrible drawbacks. I've found that a balanced force that have anti-shield/anti-armor in unison to almost always be superior to disruptors, except when facing a considerably technologically superior opponent, then you have no choice but to try and bypass their armor/shields which are massive, and even then still requires outnumbering them and being able to win the attrition war.
@@deathstrack Nah. They've always been good, people just don't THINK. It's a weapon designed for swarms. I place it on a Corvette setup that I use for knife fleets as a rapid reaction late game. Those fleets have tore awakened empire fleets apart by themselves in so many games. The only reason they aren't broken is the simple fact of the ship designer being VERY far behind the Moo standard. Honestly I keep hoping they fix ships entirely by going back to said standard but at this point it's unlikely to happen
If you get the Rubricator, you get another 15% archeo-weapons damage as well. This bonus is additive to the Archeo-engineers Ascension Perk for a total of +48%.
@@jasoncramer6717 As long as you have the minor artifact income, it certainly. It also pairs up insanely well if you can get zroni to proc and go the psionic route.
Feels thematically fitting with a Remnants empire, and your relic world means that the Institute of Archaeotech will give you some minor artifact generation.
Now what's needed is a fleet composition video. Or: How best to combine these weapons in your fleets, especially now that mono-hull mono-weapon fleets are a thing of the past, and having a fleet that works coherently together is every bit as important as the ships in the fleet. Ever since 3.6, the name of the game has been building your ships around your fleets, not your fleets around your ships like it used to be. In 3.5 the 'weapon tier list' thing made some level of sense, since the go-to meta was "hur dur me put biggest gun on biggest ship and me make whole fleet biggest ship". But nowadays, which ships you put the weapons on, the ratio of said ships in your fleet, is every bit as important if not more so than the weapons themselves. I believe it is better for fleets now to be equipped with C or B tier weapons (such as auto-canons or plasma throwers) that work harmoniously together as a team, than ones that just stack a or s tier weapons yet have no cohesion between ship types. I've come up with a few of them: The Balanced Breakfast which tries to use all the weapon types at once while still giving each individual ship type a specific role, the Missile Marauder which runs almost exclusively on torpedos and missiles, the Critical Bypass which is disruptor, missile, strike craft (while mostly the disruptor), the one-two punch which combines autocannons or kinetic artillery with plasma and neutron launchers to strip the shields then go for the armor and hull, and the disruptor devestator which focuses mostly on the full disruptor/cloud lighting/arc emitter loadout.
I'm sure your fleets are better than mine but I still prefer to go "all in" on whatever build I'm going for so if I have Disruptors & Strike craft in my fleet I would never field any specific "anti-shield" weapons unless there was shield hardening or something else at play ... I may play around with some fleet designs and throw them at each other and see what works out ...
I rather like having kinetics as my longest range weapons to strip shields rapidly, then plasma weapons on the shorter range craft to melt through the armor left behind after.
Sadly due to how combat conputers work ( or don't cause it really stupid) it will choose only one of the conputers type insted of each ship doing it thing meaning you need to do a bunch of mono hull fleet escorting each other like having a battleship and titan fleet escorted by 1-2 disruper cruisers fleet
Expectations: disrupters and whirlwind missiles at S or A tier and autocannons/ kinetic artillery above normal kinetics, I also think that torpedoes are above normal missiles Edit: poor gigacannons, fallen from grace and honor😢
One thing I personally feel that I'd be interested to see Montu's take on is that as range increases, my preference for shield damage over armor/hull damage increases markedly. This means that for the shortest range weapons, I want them only hitting hull and some armor, medium range I want hitting armor with some shields, and max range I want hitting only shields. This is because standard weapons damage shields->armor->hull, which means that things that engage first (maximum range stuff that hits as soon as you engage) should try to take out shields, and the last stuff to get in range should be hitting hull or armor since hopefully shields have been largely stripped by then. What does everyone think?
@@JB-xl2jc I think there's still something to be said for long range armour/hull weapons as there's a LOT of shield bypass stuff in the current macro but yeah, generally I think your takes not a bad one. It's worth remembering that shields feel like the "alpha strike" defence and everything else is there for the brawl after.
@@JB-xl2jc This has been my take on it too and works really well. Shields regenerate the fastest and can be the hardest nut to crack if you ignore them. Artillery should favor shields while close up ships or closer range weaponry should be focused on the final blow. This all goes out the window however when most of your ships are equipped with missiles and torpedo's.
"Battleships now are slow, cumbersome beasts that are not as good as they once were--torpedoes have really nullified their advantages." --Fleet Admiral Lord Montu Plays, somehow referring to both 1950 and 2350 naval combat.
Specializing your ships against specific enemies really only works early game. The vast majority of the time, you're fighting multiple empires and a good, well rounded design works best. I also make "archeo fleets" and "vanilla fleets" to get around the minor artifacts issue.
Early game as well, I've found it's best to create a default fleet as well. Corvettes with missiles, artiller combat computer and being built to be as fast as possible tend to outpace anything the AI can build for a long while, because it outranges them and is hard to hit back in turn.
Not to mention the AI tends to have a problem with upgrading ships. Every time I try to check their ship designs it’s always a jumbled mess and every ship has a different design. Despite sharing the same design name. That, and micromanaging being a pain, are why I prefer to have a nice “one size destroys all” approach to fleet design.
it works against fallen empires and crisises. And players if youre smart. AI empires have to varied ships and they usually also go for allrounder builds which lack counters
The next thing I want to see added for weapons is strike craft diversity. Fighter-type strike craft for engaging other strike craft, Gunship-type strike craft with autocannons and lasers for engaging smaller targets, and torpedo strike craft for engaging capital ships.
@@fickogames9612 What micro is there in choosing ship parts? Just look at your enemies fleet and counter whatever they have. There's no micro involved.
From someone that has been playing since launch: try finding your own style first. The reason why Stellaris is so great is its replayability and a big reason for that is the different stories you can write by playing. So don't min-max every game and have fun :)
@@Minimeister317 yeah I’d just do corvette spam lol Hive minds can tank losses pretty easily especially a lithoid Terravore you’ll be able to replace easily,
@@Minimeister317Devouring swarm is fun, scary sometimes, especially if you find yourself next to people who don't take kindly with a ravenous hive near them.
I'd love to see a discussion on fleet composition, weapon loadouts per class of ship, etc... I have always tended to let the auto-building design stuff but I'm trying to optimize a bit more going forward.
I'd really recommend hand optimizations. Even if you pick a fairly "meh" design type I think you'll see more fleet-wide synergies than you would by letting auto-design having a crack. YMMV
Ever since launch I've always setup my corvettes with "1 kinetic 2 energy". Chew the shield and then rip it apart with energy. So 1AC 2Plasma is my default on corvettes and that seems to work like a charm. AC quickly removes the shields. Plasma melts the armor. And all three wreck the hull.
I think there is a really important caveat to the weapon tier list and that is fleet composition. As you have said, some weapons are better than others, but effectively countering and supporting weapons can have a significant role in how effective you are in fighting. What comes to my mind is those drone strike craft. They lack the shield penetration, but supporting them with ships that can effectively strip shield may negate that lack of shield penetration. Thus the null void beam may be terrible on its own, having a handful of them might be more handy than you give them credit. edit: the sooner those shields are gone, the sooner your drones can tear through an enemy ship
I'm surprised you didn't mention the very good synergy between cloaking and torpedoes. Fill out a frigate fleet with decent cloaking, and you can place them right on top of highly fortified starbases before telling them to fire. While the ai tends to go heavy on cloaking detection, you can usually find a path through or just outpace their detection entirely. Human players are even more susceptible to this since the majority of players don't invest in good detection arrays. And even with all of that out of the way there is still the fact that all space fauna, end game crisis factions, and the Grey Tempest don't use any cloaking detection. You can get a cheap shot on the Unbidden portal, the nanite production hub, Contingency Worlds, and every single Leviathan. It's such a useful tactic for eliminating one big defensive stronghold so your battleships can move through without getting so much as their paint chipped.
A shame that frigates seem to be otherwise useless unless they're cloaked for a surprise attack. I tried to use and like Frigates when they were introduced, but it seemed every naval engagement the only losses my fleet would suffer would be all of my frigates.
I feel as though the way repeatables are spread out would adjust all Strike Craft, Energy, and Explosive weapons up, and Kinetics down late game. Engineering is crowded, spread between the Armor, Explosive, and Kinetics repeatables - so focusing on armor and explosive is best to limit competing for repeatables. Society has Strike Craft only, and therefore has no competition for repeating, and Physics is spread between Energy and Shields - so less competition, particularly if you do not use shields.
Even though it's really sub-par, I can't help but love the Mega cannons; they feel so much like MAC guns to me. I always throw in a few on my defense stations and alpha strike battleship fleets. Just love seeing the shields on an enemy ship go from full to zeroed out in a single blast. Good list btw, thanks for helping a guy who skipped a few patches
Something that really is evident looking through other comments is that everyone uses a combination of weapons which makes total sense. I was a bit confused that Montu treated all the weapons like they were only used by themselves
I managed to get my first win by combining m/l plasmas with s/m null void beams, so that does seem to be a very nice combo. Mixing small autocannons and medium plasmas on destroyers is also a very good combo.
I first found this channel via a weapon tier list, and its wild that this list has flipped the energy/kinetic/explosive tiering on its head from that time.
If anyone is interested in a really broken combo with the Ancient Nano-Missile Cloud Launcher, may I recommend you to become the crisis. As the Crisis you can unlock the Menacing ship type that only costs minerals, no matter what you equip it with. Meaning you can use these Archeotech weapons without the Minor Artifact cost. You can also pretty much guarantee a max evasion percentage to your destroyers and maybe even cruisers with few broken combos. Meaning you can create super dodgy ships, with missiles that penetrate most defenses, and it'll only cost you minerals. Did one playthrough with this and it was so stupidly easy that I got bored before I ever got a chance to press the big red button.
Yea archeo is slept on. I didnt take the crisis though. Early game i had the fortune of surveying and acquiring 3 systems with of artifact deposits (10+) and used that to fill up my minor artifacts while tech rushing the arch weapons tech (ignoring some of the normal weapons tech). On top of that my empire is psionic so i got the mark of the whisperers which increases evasion to 15% per slot, plus the arch shields and armor then took up the archeo engineers perk which increases weapon damage by 33% but also shield and armor effects which i realized only later in the game (+75 hit points). archeo is slept on, for now.
would love a video going over the best fleet compositions i.e. how many of each ship type, for both early mid and late game, plus what designs you recommend for those points in the game. basically just tell me how to do my fleets cus i cant be bothered.
I've found that the setup that works best for me is to have multiple types of same-class ships, covering most weapons. This way every fleet is able to hold their own against any enemy layout, even if it is not optimal.
I know going in that the Null Void Beam is bad on its own, but I've met with some good success pairing them up with energy torpedos on stealth corvettes
Current favorite combo is fast carrier cruisers with driller drones, whirlwind and missiles. Escorted by corvettes with autocannons to strip shields for the drillers. Also like pure carrier battleships with drillers and missiles/whirlwind alongside kinetic artillery battleships.
If they would add an upgraded version of the Energy Siphon and Ming Laser which are better than the "normal" weapons it would make them much more interresting and worth while to research
Montu, another consideration for viability that could be made is the tech cost of researching said weapons. If a competitive fleet could be made with monoweapon-ships, that could tech-cheaper to achieve than one that needs a balance of weapons which all have to be researched and take longer to upgrade fully tech-wise. Also, if the tech-cost of weapons on one fleet is lower than that of another, that would also give someone an advantage. Because, given how tech tiers work, this would allow valuable tech to be spent elsewhere, like economy, tech acceleration or synths if you're going with that. Or rushing megastructures.
I feel like bypass weapons are probably a little OP, and should have reduced damage versus the defence layer they bypass. Right now it seems hardening isn't even really a hard counter. Its hard to reach high hardening % in the first place, and using up very valuable slots in the process. If you can force bypass weapons to do reduced damage vs the type they are no longer bypassing, it should make hardening a much more worthwhile investment, and hopefully balance these weapons a bit better than a '100% must use' on every fleet
Yeah, I feel like shield/armor hardening needs a little buff. I just simply don’t bother with them when they should be a good counter to bypass weapons.
@@MrWeeseAChine Yeah. Seems the best way to counter bypass weapons is just to use bypass weapons yourself and build a bigger fleet which takes a lot of the fun out of weapon variety
@@fbwhitey If it matters I run a "bad" [outdated?] design with tons of shield [or shield+armor] bypass but oddly have lots of Shields with 75%+ hardening. Seems to work well against the AI that never counters the design. The changes to shield recharge though are a kick in the pants. Might try a more armor centric approach and see how well that works.
its actually possible to get swarm strikers fairly early if one of your enemies had the "daughter of stars" event, if you kill and research the daughter of stars you get preythorian weapons, and considering its fleet power is only 1.4k, its very doable within the first 20 years of the game
These weapon stat updates really seem to encourage building two fleets per task force: - A screen fleet with corvettes and some close combat Destroyers set to take point and engage enemy first. - A heavy support (artillery) fleet that supports the screen fleet when engaging the enemy, Could you test this theory Montu?
Until they give you some kind of combined arms bonus it's always going to be optimal to go for just one type of ship with a loadout that targets one specific opponent. Any mixed fleet is always going to lose to it's hard counter and be worse against it's preferable target than the full hard counter to that.
Love your tier lists! Just spent a 9-hour drive from Californian Canberra to Californian Sydney watching all these, opened up my PC, equipped my fleet with missiles and torpedos, and dropped the hammer on the Spiritual FE next door. All credit goes to your sage advice :)
really curious on the logic of Scourge Missiles being worse than regular torpedos when Scourges have triple the range and almost triple the base damage
I feel like the reason is its such a late tech, and you need to destroy a Scourge fleet to acquire them. By the time you can defeat Scourge fleets you've already won the game pretty much.
I feel like it should be considered as a missile with torpedo characteristic than actual torpedo. It has the range of 90, slightly shorter than missile, but far exceeding those of torpedo. It also lack firing arc and fire quickly like normal missile while flying at the same speed. As such, I consider it as giving torpedo advantage to missile build rather than to be use as part of conventional torpedo build, staying at range and lobbing missile until they all die instead of charging in and launch its torpedo at point blank range.
this is fantastic to know, all the guides ive seen for what weapons are actually good are all around a year old or more, being outdated. Thank you so much for taking the time to actually look at every weapon, test them, and actually telling us what they are good for rather than just "UsE tHiS bEcAuSe GoOd"
Their is so much nuance though... like 1 Energy siphon pairs great with two tier 1 lasers early on, and they are flat-out better than a tier 1 mass driver in range (60 vs 50.) This means the siphon removes shields faster than the t1 md, (since they fire before mass drivers in combat) plus they get +200% damage vs shields compared to only 150% mass drivers. So if you have two tier 1 lasers equipped on a corvette, putting on an energy siphon is more advantageous than a tier 1 mass driver. The faster you take down your opponent's shield, the quicker your lasers can target their armor. Also they just look very thematic and cool when you're playing an energy weapon faction. As soon as tier 2 mass drivers are researched, dich the siphons, but there is an early window at the beginning of the game, where if you have them and not tier 2 mass drivers, definitely use them.
My preferred fleet mix usually creates 2 of each class level of ship: a shield killer, and an armor killer. I've found this works very well, though it can be a bit expensive at times.
I did a little of my own testing and found that - at least for *early game* against AI - laser weaponry is the worst, with coilguns being the best. Rockets being somewhere in-between, but not better than coilguns. Only tested with level 1 weaponry. Disruptors are still a hard-rush for corvettes since you can get them fairly early. I know this video is a year old, but hey, it's nice to be updated for those that go through the comments.
Ancient driller drones on hanger defense platforms in a pulsar system of mine wiped out over 5 times the starbase fleet power, not even an optimized starbase build.
Can you please include a rating for the general that got the dragonslayer trait by meleeing a dragon to death from his ship in one the tournaments? Gotta be SS tier right?
One thing I think worth mentioning is how good strike craft repeatables are. Late game I often find myself having already gotten everything else I need from society tech tree, while I still need stuff in physics/engineering. So it lets me scale them up while researching other tech.
Thanks for the list i dont have a ton of hours in the game so this really helps keep me on an even footing playing with my buddy whos been playing alot longer
I usually go for a combined weapons approach. I put a bit of kinetic on there to bust though shields and then deck the ships out in lasers. Destroyers are basically relegated to PD only.
I want to get better at the game so I'm will state what I think would be a good idea and then learn if it is or not and if not thw reason why. If you put a single auto-canon on a ship and have the other weapons be effective against armour, then the auto-canon with its quick fire-rate will destroy the shield first, leaving the armour now bare for the other weapons to crack through very quickly. Therefore, having a single auto-canon on a ship with mostly armour-destroying weapon is a good idea.
While I find some things are correct about this tier list, there is a problem I see with it and that is the basis you are using for the analysis is practically a vacuum which when translated into a game doesn't really applies. When people look at a tier list they do so in order to look at what are the best weapons and then make a fleet based on what is better. For that you can't analyse things in a vacuum, you need to take other things into consideration. Now you do take armour vs shield into consideration so it's not completly in a vacuum, you also take into consideration looking at what the opponent fleet is. While the first is good, the second isn't and here's why. Generally the AI just uses presets for their fleet compositions, variations tend to be more dependent on what tech they've unlocked thus far than actual preferences set for each empire. What this means is that yes, there will be a variation in tech between enemy empires and of course the crysis and fallen empires, generally speaking the threat of a random empire isn't big and everything can be overcome with having much larger fleets and striking the moment they appear. For that reason it's completly irrelevant to change your fleet to hit better on armor or shields or hull depending on the empire you are fighting, it actually only makes it a pain in the ass and a waste of alloys to be constantly refiting and against things like crysis, it is better to strike the moment they appear. Deal with them before they can gain any momentum which makes refiting to fight them a poor choice. With that out of the way what we need to base weapon analysis is fleet composition and repeatable tech. Let's stater with repeatable tech. Repeatable tech makes even a bad weapon the best weapon to use. Onc you have something like +50% to damage and attack speed, a base version with no bonus does not compete with it anymore. Of course we don't want to do that with the worst weapons, we want to do it with the best, however there are caviats. There is no point in investing into both kinetic weapons, energy weapons, missiles and strike craft. You want to focus your research so you only buff the weapons you use. Second is fleet composition and here you have 2 ways of going, the old way which is only battleships (with a titan per fleet for aura) or mixed fleets. In my opinion the old way is still the better way because anything smaller than a battleship at the end game gets destroyed too easily. In a mixed fleet you are expecting each ship type to have a role and the combined roles is what makes the fleet effective, however battles are not one fight and you're done. You have to fight multiple fights and usually hold the systems for a while so the ground attack forces can capture the planets and that can lead to additional fights. If you lost a lot of weaker ships, your ship composition is now out of balance and your fighting effectiveness has decreased significantly. But if your fleet is all battleships all with the same configuration, lose 3 or 4 battleships and all you lost is some firepower, you are still largely effective. Don't forget that battleships are several times more survival than anything else so you lose a lot less power too just for having them instead of a mixed fleet. So with this in mind, let's look again at the tier list and reconsider for a moment. What is the most effective weapon on a battleship? Strike craft are the answer. As a big slow moving ship, your major issue are the ships that move fast and deal lots of damage up close, but your strike craft destroys up to destroyer class ships very quickly and effectively. These should be in S tier, not A. Also consider that strike craft intercept other strike craft and so flak artillery is actually not that good on your ships. What you'd want is point defense which is speciaised for missiles since strike craft no longer intercept them. Suddenly that point defense is now solidly into A tier. S tier if we consider that is 1 of the 2 only existing point defenses and the best in slot. With this in mind, how do we follow up on weapons? Well if we have strike craft, we will have some S and M slots as well and what fits the role best here? Missiles. They have the best range, do good damage and like the strike craft, they bypass shields so this is where we invest next. I do agree with your tiering on the missiles, they are well placed though it's debatable whether tier 5 missiles should be A or S since are small slot, they are not really competing with whirlwind missiles per say. You also classify every titan weapon very low even though you ideally have 1 titan per fleet and therefore will always have a titan weapon. I'd probably rate them higher since there is only 2 and I'd rate the basic one higher. In most engagements, even longer duration ones you generally only fire it once, maybe twice on the archeotech if it's a very long battle so having the higher damage is generally better and it doesn't uses minor relics. As for the point on whether you will have them in a role or another. I'd consider that a moot point. There is no point in using a titan if not for the aura but that doesn't means we shoul leave it weaponless. That said I would like stellaris to actually give use slot options for titans rather than just all large and titan weapon. At this point we could debate whether battleships should have a large weapon on the back or medium, we could debate whether they should X weapon on the front or not and debating this would lead us to whether we invest into energy weapon, kinetic weapons or neither. I prefer neither to better focus my research and on that note. Yes, armour is better by default, but looking at my set up, I have engineering repeatables for missiles, society for strike craft and nothing on the physics. This means that I could invest into energy weapons as a thrid, or I could just go shields instead of armour, by doing so my shields will be strong regardless and I don't have to divide my engineering research into missiles and armor thus I am far more effectively gaining power. The poor titan is the one that comes worst for wear since I won't be buffing it asside from the shields but he's there for the aura anyway. Now while I did explain my setup, it's important to think how a game realistically sets up how fleets are composed, how repeatables should be focused instead of spread around. These things make tiering quite different than what you made for some of the weapons.
I think autocannons + missiles or strikecraft are a strong combination, ACs are worse now that armor is stronger than shields but they still have massive base damage for their size. 12-20 DPS times 0.25 times 0.85 against armor is nothing to write home about, but for a weakness it's better than other weapons against their counter. Being strong against two out of three layers of defense is still great in my book. Huge upgrade from mass drivers (regardless of tier pretty much) for corvettes.
I've been having a blast running fleets of stealth frigates and corvettes and ambushing enemy fleets. Decloak right on top of them so they don't get a chance to use their artillery, knock out their large ships with the frigates, and have the corvettes mop up other corvettes/destroyers. The only downsides are that the low evasion of the frigates means I have to replace a lot of them after every battle and cloaking requires going full armour, but I'm still coming out way ahead alloy-wise.
Disruptors are S tier??? When i used them, they made most of the enemy ships disengage, which caused wars to last forever. (You need to destroy ships to increase war exhaustion of your enemy.) It is no fun to be entangled in drawn-out wars all the time.
One thing to be said about the new meta is that with both energy weapons and armor being so much better weapons, it really allows you to specialise your repeat techs. I get a low amount of shield techs, and then just complete focus on energy weapon repeats in physics. and in engineering i spend 95% of my effort solely on the armor repeat tech.
I've actually had a lot of fun putting stormfire autocannons on my torpedo cruisers. They're already rushing in to close range, and by the time they take shields down the torps have wrecked the armor and they can go to work on the hull.
I have been doing something cheeky with the systems that nullify shields if I'm lucky to have it as a choke point, which is just stack a plasma cloaked fleet, and wait for whoever is dumb enough to fly their fleet through. It's great on solo for keeping a good surprise defender in nearby systems.
Has the weapon tier changed with the more recent releases - currently 3.12 Andromeda? Sounds like Stellaris needs to allow Front/Aft/Left/Right/Top/Bottom firing weapons for things like Gigacannon to compensate for the 25% arc.
For me it's been, Disruptors for Corvette's and Destroyer's. Missile Cruiser's on mass paired with Carrier Battleship's with flack and missiles, 1 Battleship per 5 Cruiser's. I used to love Kinetic weapons...☹️.
I will say for the archeo-weapons if people want to try them is to go with the relic world origin start. You get a building that produces minor artifacts. You can start stockpiling them from day one and get more from exploring ruins while you wait to research the weapon techs. Also taking the perk is a must as not only does it boost the weapons damage but also upgrades all of the archeo-shield/armor techs and upgrades the building mentioned above by giving it two more jobs allowing you to produce more minor artifacts.
The biggest problem I had was the really low storage cap. I was alternating between not being able to store additional artifacts and desperately trying to get more when a fleet that was built up over years got blown up.
I am quite surprised (and disappointed) that in combat ships do not focus fire different weapons on the most vulnerable enemy. Ex. 20 energy siphons drain shields on enemy ship #1 until it has none left, then all the siphons switch to enemy #2, while lasers shoot ship #1's armor and hull.
35:45 enemy emergency FTL - with pure disruptor corvettes, i basically don't kill anything due to emergency FTL. i also see a lot of emergency FTL with strikecraft
Can I pretty please have a chart or list version of this tier list including pros and cons of each? You're the best Montu, even if you can't help me out with my request.
Playing a race starting on a relic world and with a minor artifact mine. I constantly find other artifact mines while I survey in the beginning. All acrotech weapons are fine with their upkeep. Of course I went into the Archotech ascension. Plus putting these on menacing ships waive all non-power/mineral upkeeps.
Keep in Mind that the ancient killer drones do not engage other fighters. So against the grey tempest and certain space bugs, you might want to swap to regular fighters or build in more flak.
I didn’t know that. What is a good counter to FE and Swarm? I used to clown them by year fifty when they had tons of ships but now when they have like six ships they kill two groups of carrier battle ships.
@@thedismayer1196 For me it worked to design 30-50 flak destroyers to fly ahead and distract the fighters until your own fighter are there. The main ships are weak. You may even get away with a lot of flak corvettes.
The way I view Ancient weapons is you either put them in your heavy hitter high risk reward admirals that focus on damage output. Or you put them in a fleet that is all about retreating to fight another day
Problem with swarm missiles is that they are considered one missile with lots of health. What would make waaay more sense is if the component actually launched several missiles that individually can be shot down. Because right now you need on average 3+ PD to 1 swarm missile module to remove ALL damage from the swarm missile. If it simply launched e.g. 4 missiles, out of which 2 are shot down and deals thus 50% of its maximum damage, then it makes sense. You can still saturate PD, but you dont straight out bypass all PD.
Would love to see a video about the best ship designs/fleet designs, I still don't know if I should keep some corvettes, frigates and destroyers in the mid/late game or only focus on cruisers and battleships! Anyway great video Mr Montu!
I'd really love some new videos about how to build the different classes of ships with the new balancing. Different fleet compositions for different stages of the game.
My general fleet designs have been torpedo cruisers with disruptors, missile destroyers in long range fire support, and some form of artillery battleships. After this, I might work my battleships into aircraft carriers so that I have a torpedo spearhead with missile and strike craft support and see how that works. Still need to work out the best setup for defense platforms, though it sort of seems like making noting but swarm missile platforms might just work for simplicity. However, I feel again you have something of a double standard with how you're rating weapons. Like when talking about the Ancient Driller Drones you make mention of "if you can strip enemies of their shield", yet rank most of the anti-shield weaponry very low and largely recommend against using, and pretty much talk disparately about the anti-shield properties of those weapons that got higher up in the list like it's some asterisk you felt obliged to comment on.
Style-wise, I love the idea of really big kinetic weapons. And I like how lasers look way more than plasma cannons. Outside of multiplayer, it still performs decently against the AI in my experience in commodore difficulty. And its balanced enough that I don't have to do as much work retrofitting 1000s of fleet capacity for new foes.
I like a mixed neutron launcher cruiser and kinetic artillery battleship/titan fleet. Line computer on the cruisers to get them out front, artillery computer on the battleships, they tend to line up nasty alpha strikes. Mind I only use one or two fleets like this to supplement my main stacks of torpedo/disruptor cruisers and arc emitter/carrier battleship stacks by the late game.
I used 1 null void on my destroyer at the start of the game. It seemed like they were verry effective in small quantities to rip through their shields quickly. PVE btw.
Archaeo-weapons are what I exclusively arm my Oveseer Hive ships with for my Hive Mind empires if I go for Archaeotech, while my non-Overseer ships languish with "just" normal weapons. Keeps the cost down across the empire.
one quick tip would be the order of the weapon cards for the Macro Batteries was (from left to right) medium-small-large, and would probably be best done as small-medium-large. Great video though!
I used to only use lasers mass drivers and missiles, and was totally dismissive of torpedoes. I just recently used the devastator torpedoes recently and oh my god I can never go back.
Versions 3.10 two games have shown in early game I can face AI fleets valued 1/3 more than mine with 1/6th the losses. In both cases the AI used missiles & kinetic: they were ready for shields. I used 2 corvette designs: both with all armor (no shields); 3/4ths of my fleet had kinetic flack + 1energy & 1 kinetic gun. The remaining 1/4 had 2 energy guns & 1 kinetic. I delt six times the damage, shot down nearly all their damage even with my 34 corvettes facing their 50! I lost 6 ships compared to 25, muahaha. OMG, if I could have met them in a nebula...
I think the armor/shield rebalance was supposed to make kinetic weapons useful for hit-and-run tactics, but bypass weapons are better for that and in the case where hardening becomes a factor you’re better off abandoning hit-and-run altogether.
I love using Energy Siphon and Null Void Beam. Good to take out shields for my lasers and plasma weapons. And since they're all energy weapons, I never have to bother boosting kinetic, strike craft and missile repeatables.
The gigachad move of going crisis path in MP, and not investing in encryption. So the entire lobby sees you stack nano-missle cloud launchers in horror!
Mining lasers are better than indicated if you're holding off on blue lasers in order to steer the tech tree, which I do routinely while focusing on missiles & torpedoes. They're excellent critter killers & make your starbases a bit better, since the bases themselves use a mix of energy & kinetic weaponry.
Doesn't -90% ship build cost reduction make the minor artifact cost irrelevant? I mean it makes fleet building trivial in general, but it especially kind of makes that a moot point.
Archeotech ascension perk alongside ancient nano swarm missles & driller drones is ridiculously broken, really easy to win the game if you go crisis as soon as you can put even ONE of those on menacing corvettes
I have to say, I dont even research some of the archaeotech weapons anymore, simply for the fact that I fear that the automation system of starbases puts them on there for no reason other than apparently having high fleet power, though they suck I honestly wish we'd either get a system to exclude tech from automatic research or being able to customize starbases... and lets be real, the second one was asked for for years, so I guess Im outa luck with this one :
A torpedo battery module on a starbase can give you 2 Proton Launchers at the cost of 37 alloys flat. Sounds a lot better than 1 hangar or a plasma cannon / disruptor combo that the other modules give.
TY for the post!!! I was hoping that a new tier list would appear. I suspect my favorites aren't best but I'm looking forward to what's good vs. other players / Fallen Empires / Crisis fleets / etc.!!
Looks like my favorite designs are in the "meh" class but I guess that's OK with me. BB with FAE, 2 strike craft, some PD, and disruptors for things that get too close. I usually only care about fielding these against Fallen/Awakened/Crisis empires where they seem to do at least OK. Given the issues with shields I may play with more armor-centric approaches and see where that gets me.
Specialize a specific ship or a few that deal aoe shield damage mixed into your fleet and a major amount of armor melting ships and lots of corvets with shield caps.
The weapon cooldowns in stellaris crack me up everytime I immagine the life of your average crewman.... "We have fired the gun. Good job everyone. See you in two weeks to fire again."
You have to make some compromises when having the space battles on your regular map.
I've always assumed that time is faster in the game than it would be in reality too. Having a civilization go from a single homeworld to inhabiting the entire galaxy in 2-300 years seems ridiculous otherwise.
So if that's the case, those crewmen might actually be taking a 2-4 month vacation between artillery shots! Seems like a great benefits package to me.
I imagine it as it takes that long to take care of all that heat produced when firing, otherwise you end up melting that weapon and/or the ship carrying it lol.
Nah. It just takes 2 weeks of math to calculate each shot.
@@furiouskaiser9914 +, it is main issue of every imaginable space battle, 90% of combat ship should be heat vents
Now that Montu’s video is out, seems like a perfect time for the devs to announce a weapons rebalancing/overhaul.
Ha. Every time. They are working on a patch now.
Weapons ranking? Didn't he already do one a while back?
Where's the traits ranking we were promised?
@@zacharyhollands presumably on the editing table, since he wasn't done with it yet when they released the rebalancing patch that made him have to redo parts.
Literally, every time Montu has a weapons video, a weapons rebalancing patch follows closely after. I think the Devs are glued to this channel 24/7, it is a conspiracy!
@@zacharyhollands
On the cutting room floor because those got changed just when it was probably ready, too
Confession: I always research energy siphon because it gets annoying showing up on every new tech choice
Honestly not a bad idea when you get to that point.
@@ChaoticNeutralMatt I usually ignore it till I have only options I wish to skip and its the cheapest option on the list, pretty much allows me to re-shuffle the cards quicker
Energy Siphons should also reduce the targets power making weapons like lasers fire slower, after burners to be less effective and shield / armour hardening to be less effective.
I use it as a fast tech to research when there is nothing good in the pool of new research 🤣
@@spugggaldon361 or recharge your own while taking the enemy shields
With a name like "energy SIPHON" I would at least expect every hit to restore at least some small amount of my ship's shields
Or debuff enemy generator output, so his systems suffer random failures.
True
Back in the day they targeted the energy supply
It should really increase the ship's power supply.
I usually put it on my corvettes at mid to late to annoy the enemy fleets and take down their shields
Another reason to use Disruptors: when a ships takes hull damage, it will have its fire rate decreased by a percentage equal to half of the percentage of Hull Points lost. By dealing damage directly to Hull in most cases, it becomes more difficult for them to fight back
Good to know, thanks!
That's one reason to put arc emitters on your battleships too. One of them doesn't kill the enemy but reduces their fire rate while the rest of your weapons chew through their shields and armor.
All weapons combat in this game is very situational. As mentioned in the vid, disruptors weaknesses of short range, and making an enemy more likely to retreat rather than be destroyed because of the low damage, are terrible drawbacks. I've found that a balanced force that have anti-shield/anti-armor in unison to almost always be superior to disruptors, except when facing a considerably technologically superior opponent, then you have no choice but to try and bypass their armor/shields which are massive, and even then still requires outnumbering them and being able to win the attrition war.
Man, the old Marvel movies really were a cut above.
Late 2000s were a very different time.
you said a lot there
Honestly, yes.
I’ve never seen the clip before. Did he just blow up a foreign mountain range just for shits and giggles?
@N0TYALC it's a weapons demonstration, but yes
Disruptor went from F tier to S tier weapon
Truly Inspiring
I've... always used disrupters, and they've never failed me since the first iteration
@@TruthHunterTeenwell they used to be so useless when i looked at them recently I was like wtf happened it’s really good now
People always seem to read the avg damage and leave it at that.
@@deathstrack Nah. They've always been good, people just don't THINK. It's a weapon designed for swarms. I place it on a Corvette setup that I use for knife fleets as a rapid reaction late game. Those fleets have tore awakened empire fleets apart by themselves in so many games. The only reason they aren't broken is the simple fact of the ship designer being VERY far behind the Moo standard. Honestly I keep hoping they fix ships entirely by going back to said standard but at this point it's unlikely to happen
@@tj7094 pretty much.
If you get the Rubricator, you get another 15% archeo-weapons damage as well. This bonus is additive to the Archeo-engineers Ascension Perk for a total of +48%.
I'm gonna make a race of Indiana Joneses that focuses archaeotech. I think it will be sort of maybe viable.
@@jasoncramer6717 As long as you have the minor artifact income, it certainly. It also pairs up insanely well if you can get zroni to proc and go the psionic route.
Feels thematically fitting with a Remnants empire, and your relic world means that the Institute of Archaeotech will give you some minor artifact generation.
Now what's needed is a fleet composition video. Or: How best to combine these weapons in your fleets, especially now that mono-hull mono-weapon fleets are a thing of the past, and having a fleet that works coherently together is every bit as important as the ships in the fleet.
Ever since 3.6, the name of the game has been building your ships around your fleets, not your fleets around your ships like it used to be. In 3.5 the 'weapon tier list' thing made some level of sense, since the go-to meta was "hur dur me put biggest gun on biggest ship and me make whole fleet biggest ship". But nowadays, which ships you put the weapons on, the ratio of said ships in your fleet, is every bit as important if not more so than the weapons themselves.
I believe it is better for fleets now to be equipped with C or B tier weapons (such as auto-canons or plasma throwers) that work harmoniously together as a team, than ones that just stack a or s tier weapons yet have no cohesion between ship types.
I've come up with a few of them: The Balanced Breakfast which tries to use all the weapon types at once while still giving each individual ship type a specific role, the Missile Marauder which runs almost exclusively on torpedos and missiles, the Critical Bypass which is disruptor, missile, strike craft (while mostly the disruptor), the one-two punch which combines autocannons or kinetic artillery with plasma and neutron launchers to strip the shields then go for the armor and hull, and the disruptor devestator which focuses mostly on the full disruptor/cloud lighting/arc emitter loadout.
I'm sure your fleets are better than mine but I still prefer to go "all in" on whatever build I'm going for so if I have Disruptors & Strike craft in my fleet I would never field any specific "anti-shield" weapons unless there was shield hardening or something else at play ... I may play around with some fleet designs and throw them at each other and see what works out ...
I rather like having kinetics as my longest range weapons to strip shields rapidly, then plasma weapons on the shorter range craft to melt through the armor left behind after.
I go full missile lol. It's fun. Torpedo cruisers are fun
Sadly due to how combat conputers work ( or don't cause it really stupid) it will choose only one of the conputers type insted of each ship doing it thing meaning you need to do a bunch of mono hull fleet escorting each other like having a battleship and titan fleet escorted by 1-2 disruper cruisers fleet
@@madiaw5553 I’ve heard a few people say that they fixed that, but my artillery ships are still casually strolling into melee range
Expectations: disrupters and whirlwind missiles at S or A tier and autocannons/ kinetic artillery above normal kinetics, I also think that torpedoes are above normal missiles
Edit: poor gigacannons, fallen from grace and honor😢
One thing I personally feel that I'd be interested to see Montu's take on is that as range increases, my preference for shield damage over armor/hull damage increases markedly. This means that for the shortest range weapons, I want them only hitting hull and some armor, medium range I want hitting armor with some shields, and max range I want hitting only shields. This is because standard weapons damage shields->armor->hull, which means that things that engage first (maximum range stuff that hits as soon as you engage) should try to take out shields, and the last stuff to get in range should be hitting hull or armor since hopefully shields have been largely stripped by then. What does everyone think?
@@JB-xl2jc I think there's still something to be said for long range armour/hull weapons as there's a LOT of shield bypass stuff in the current macro but yeah, generally I think your takes not a bad one. It's worth remembering that shields feel like the "alpha strike" defence and everything else is there for the brawl after.
@@JB-xl2jc This has been my take on it too and works really well. Shields regenerate the fastest and can be the hardest nut to crack if you ignore them. Artillery should favor shields while close up ships or closer range weaponry should be focused on the final blow. This all goes out the window however when most of your ships are equipped with missiles and torpedo's.
I'd actually love to see how gigacannon/ancient driller drone battleships fare against any other fleet.
@@JohnDoe-pq1te they die
"Battleships now are slow, cumbersome beasts that are not as good as they once were--torpedoes have really nullified their advantages."
--Fleet Admiral Lord Montu Plays, somehow referring to both 1950 and 2350 naval combat.
Specializing your ships against specific enemies really only works early game. The vast majority of the time, you're fighting multiple empires and a good, well rounded design works best.
I also make "archeo fleets" and "vanilla fleets" to get around the minor artifacts issue.
Early game as well, I've found it's best to create a default fleet as well. Corvettes with missiles, artiller combat computer and being built to be as fast as possible tend to outpace anything the AI can build for a long while, because it outranges them and is hard to hit back in turn.
Not to mention the AI tends to have a problem with upgrading ships. Every time I try to check their ship designs it’s always a jumbled mess and every ship has a different design. Despite sharing the same design name.
That, and micromanaging being a pain, are why I prefer to have a nice “one size destroys all” approach to fleet design.
it works against fallen empires and crisises. And players if youre smart. AI empires have to varied ships and they usually also go for allrounder builds which lack counters
Yeah, I got the Zhroni relic, put a bunch of hangars with the drillers on a choke point and just went "come, break against my shores."
The next thing I want to see added for weapons is strike craft diversity. Fighter-type strike craft for engaging other strike craft, Gunship-type strike craft with autocannons and lasers for engaging smaller targets, and torpedo strike craft for engaging capital ships.
There is a pretty good mod that does that, at least!
Back in the old days we already had scouts, fighters and bombers.
used to have it, caused lag so was removed.....it ain't coming back
Even more micro to stellaris? What could possibly go wrong?
@@fickogames9612 What micro is there in choosing ship parts? Just look at your enemies fleet and counter whatever they have. There's no micro involved.
As a newbie to this game, this video is so incredibly helpful as there are *so* many weapons in this game.
From someone that has been playing since launch: try finding your own style first. The reason why Stellaris is so great is its replayability and a big reason for that is the different stories you can write by playing. So don't min-max every game and have fun :)
trust me, we have to re-learn the game every few months ourselves lol
@@Kommerzman Thanks, I try. At the moment playing as Hivemind Terravore Lithoids on endless consumption.
@@Minimeister317 yeah I’d just do corvette spam lol Hive minds can tank losses pretty easily especially a lithoid Terravore you’ll be able to replace easily,
@@Minimeister317Devouring swarm is fun, scary sometimes, especially if you find yourself next to people who don't take kindly with a ravenous hive near them.
I'd love to see a discussion on fleet composition, weapon loadouts per class of ship, etc... I have always tended to let the auto-building design stuff but I'm trying to optimize a bit more going forward.
I'd really recommend hand optimizations. Even if you pick a fairly "meh" design type I think you'll see more fleet-wide synergies than you would by letting auto-design having a crack. YMMV
Ever since launch I've always setup my corvettes with "1 kinetic 2 energy". Chew the shield and then rip it apart with energy. So 1AC 2Plasma is my default on corvettes and that seems to work like a charm. AC quickly removes the shields. Plasma melts the armor. And all three wreck the hull.
I think there is a really important caveat to the weapon tier list and that is fleet composition. As you have said, some weapons are better than others, but effectively countering and supporting weapons can have a significant role in how effective you are in fighting. What comes to my mind is those drone strike craft. They lack the shield penetration, but supporting them with ships that can effectively strip shield may negate that lack of shield penetration. Thus the null void beam may be terrible on its own, having a handful of them might be more handy than you give them credit.
edit: the sooner those shields are gone, the sooner your drones can tear through an enemy ship
I'm surprised you didn't mention the very good synergy between cloaking and torpedoes. Fill out a frigate fleet with decent cloaking, and you can place them right on top of highly fortified starbases before telling them to fire. While the ai tends to go heavy on cloaking detection, you can usually find a path through or just outpace their detection entirely. Human players are even more susceptible to this since the majority of players don't invest in good detection arrays.
And even with all of that out of the way there is still the fact that all space fauna, end game crisis factions, and the Grey Tempest don't use any cloaking detection. You can get a cheap shot on the Unbidden portal, the nanite production hub, Contingency Worlds, and every single Leviathan.
It's such a useful tactic for eliminating one big defensive stronghold so your battleships can move through without getting so much as their paint chipped.
A shame that frigates seem to be otherwise useless unless they're cloaked for a surprise attack. I tried to use and like Frigates when they were introduced, but it seemed every naval engagement the only losses my fleet would suffer would be all of my frigates.
@@justinsinke2088 yeah torpedoes work better on cruisers when not using cloak. Unfortunately
I feel as though the way repeatables are spread out would adjust all Strike Craft, Energy, and Explosive weapons up, and Kinetics down late game.
Engineering is crowded, spread between the Armor, Explosive, and Kinetics repeatables - so focusing on armor and explosive is best to limit competing for repeatables. Society has Strike Craft only, and therefore has no competition for repeating, and Physics is spread between Energy and Shields - so less competition, particularly if you do not use shields.
I've need a video like this! I've never really understood how ship builds worked, great info!
Even though it's really sub-par, I can't help but love the Mega cannons; they feel so much like MAC guns to me. I always throw in a few on my defense stations and alpha strike battleship fleets.
Just love seeing the shields on an enemy ship go from full to zeroed out in a single blast.
Good list btw, thanks for helping a guy who skipped a few patches
Something that really is evident looking through other comments is that everyone uses a combination of weapons which makes total sense. I was a bit confused that Montu treated all the weapons like they were only used by themselves
Plasma is really strong if you pair them with an anti-shield weapon. So basically once shields are down the plasmas shred the targets armour and hull.
I managed to get my first win by combining m/l plasmas with s/m null void beams, so that does seem to be a very nice combo.
Mixing small autocannons and medium plasmas on destroyers is also a very good combo.
That’s how the gigacannon/neutronlauncher combo worked in the past.
I first found this channel via a weapon tier list, and its wild that this list has flipped the energy/kinetic/explosive tiering on its head from that time.
If anyone is interested in a really broken combo with the Ancient Nano-Missile Cloud Launcher, may I recommend you to become the crisis. As the Crisis you can unlock the Menacing ship type that only costs minerals, no matter what you equip it with. Meaning you can use these Archeotech weapons without the Minor Artifact cost. You can also pretty much guarantee a max evasion percentage to your destroyers and maybe even cruisers with few broken combos. Meaning you can create super dodgy ships, with missiles that penetrate most defenses, and it'll only cost you minerals. Did one playthrough with this and it was so stupidly easy that I got bored before I ever got a chance to press the big red button.
Yea archeo is slept on. I didnt take the crisis though. Early game i had the fortune of surveying and acquiring 3 systems with of artifact deposits (10+) and used that to fill up my minor artifacts while tech rushing the arch weapons tech (ignoring some of the normal weapons tech). On top of that my empire is psionic so i got the mark of the whisperers which increases evasion to 15% per slot, plus the arch shields and armor then took up the archeo engineers perk which increases weapon damage by 33% but also shield and armor effects which i realized only later in the game (+75 hit points).
archeo is slept on, for now.
The auto builder seemed to love the Energy Siphon.
Montu's weapon tier list : long, detailed video
Strat's weapon tier list : short, fun video
both are great vids tho.
montus voice doesnt bludgeon my ears tho, ill take his stuff any day
Strat is annoying af and heavily biased towards multiplayer
Love the improvement to visual clarity in the last couple videos!
would love a video going over the best fleet compositions i.e. how many of each ship type, for both early mid and late game, plus what designs you recommend for those points in the game. basically just tell me how to do my fleets cus i cant be bothered.
I've found that the setup that works best for me is to have multiple types of same-class ships, covering most weapons. This way every fleet is able to hold their own against any enemy layout, even if it is not optimal.
I know going in that the Null Void Beam is bad on its own, but I've met with some good success pairing them up with energy torpedos on stealth corvettes
Current favorite combo is fast carrier cruisers with driller drones, whirlwind and missiles. Escorted by corvettes with autocannons to strip shields for the drillers. Also like pure carrier battleships with drillers and missiles/whirlwind alongside kinetic artillery battleships.
If they would add an upgraded version of the Energy Siphon and Ming Laser which are better than the "normal" weapons it would make them much more interresting and worth while to research
Montu, another consideration for viability that could be made is the tech cost of researching said weapons.
If a competitive fleet could be made with monoweapon-ships, that could tech-cheaper to achieve than one that needs a balance of weapons which all have to be researched and take longer to upgrade fully tech-wise. Also, if the tech-cost of weapons on one fleet is lower than that of another, that would also give someone an advantage.
Because, given how tech tiers work, this would allow valuable tech to be spent elsewhere, like economy, tech acceleration or synths if you're going with that. Or rushing megastructures.
I feel like bypass weapons are probably a little OP, and should have reduced damage versus the defence layer they bypass. Right now it seems hardening isn't even really a hard counter. Its hard to reach high hardening % in the first place, and using up very valuable slots in the process. If you can force bypass weapons to do reduced damage vs the type they are no longer bypassing, it should make hardening a much more worthwhile investment, and hopefully balance these weapons a bit better than a '100% must use' on every fleet
Yeah, I feel like shield/armor hardening needs a little buff. I just simply don’t bother with them when they should be a good counter to bypass weapons.
stack admirals on your council and get the destiny trait that provides hardening. laugh at people shooting bypass weapons at you
@@MrWeeseAChine Yeah. Seems the best way to counter bypass weapons is just to use bypass weapons yourself and build a bigger fleet which takes a lot of the fun out of weapon variety
@@fbwhitey If it matters I run a "bad" [outdated?] design with tons of shield [or shield+armor] bypass but oddly have lots of Shields with 75%+ hardening. Seems to work well against the AI that never counters the design. The changes to shield recharge though are a kick in the pants. Might try a more armor centric approach and see how well that works.
its actually possible to get swarm strikers fairly early if one of your enemies had the "daughter of stars" event, if you kill and research the daughter of stars you get preythorian weapons, and considering its fleet power is only 1.4k, its very doable within the first 20 years of the game
also the locust swarm should have the swarm strikers too
That's from a mod tho, isn't it?
@@Chadiman59 im like 98% sure locust swarm is a vanilla system
@@cosmosyn2514 I meant the daughter of stars event
These weapon stat updates really seem to encourage building two fleets per task force:
- A screen fleet with corvettes and some close combat Destroyers set to take point and engage enemy first.
- A heavy support (artillery) fleet that supports the screen fleet when engaging the enemy,
Could you test this theory Montu?
Until they give you some kind of combined arms bonus it's always going to be optimal to go for just one type of ship with a loadout that targets one specific opponent. Any mixed fleet is always going to lose to it's hard counter and be worse against it's preferable target than the full hard counter to that.
Love your tier lists! Just spent a 9-hour drive from Californian Canberra to Californian Sydney watching all these, opened up my PC, equipped my fleet with missiles and torpedos, and dropped the hammer on the Spiritual FE next door. All credit goes to your sage advice :)
really curious on the logic of Scourge Missiles being worse than regular torpedos when Scourges have triple the range and almost triple the base damage
I feel like the reason is its such a late tech, and you need to destroy a Scourge fleet to acquire them. By the time you can defeat Scourge fleets you've already won the game pretty much.
I feel like it should be considered as a missile with torpedo characteristic than actual torpedo. It has the range of 90, slightly shorter than missile, but far exceeding those of torpedo. It also lack firing arc and fire quickly like normal missile while flying at the same speed. As such, I consider it as giving torpedo advantage to missile build rather than to be use as part of conventional torpedo build, staying at range and lobbing missile until they all die instead of charging in and launch its torpedo at point blank range.
For cordyceptic drones, I definitely feel that scourge missiles are S tier.
this is fantastic to know, all the guides ive seen for what weapons are actually good are all around a year old or more, being outdated. Thank you so much for taking the time to actually look at every weapon, test them, and actually telling us what they are good for rather than just "UsE tHiS bEcAuSe GoOd"
Their is so much nuance though... like 1 Energy siphon pairs great with two tier 1 lasers early on, and they are flat-out better than a tier 1 mass driver in range (60 vs 50.) This means the siphon removes shields faster than the t1 md, (since they fire before mass drivers in combat) plus they get +200% damage vs shields compared to only 150% mass drivers. So if you have two tier 1 lasers equipped on a corvette, putting on an energy siphon is more advantageous than a tier 1 mass driver. The faster you take down your opponent's shield, the quicker your lasers can target their armor. Also they just look very thematic and cool when you're playing an energy weapon faction. As soon as tier 2 mass drivers are researched, dich the siphons, but there is an early window at the beginning of the game, where if you have them and not tier 2 mass drivers, definitely use them.
My preferred fleet mix usually creates 2 of each class level of ship: a shield killer, and an armor killer. I've found this works very well, though it can be a bit expensive at times.
I did a little of my own testing and found that - at least for *early game* against AI - laser weaponry is the worst, with coilguns being the best. Rockets being somewhere in-between, but not better than coilguns. Only tested with level 1 weaponry. Disruptors are still a hard-rush for corvettes since you can get them fairly early. I know this video is a year old, but hey, it's nice to be updated for those that go through the comments.
Ancient driller drones on hanger defense platforms in a pulsar system of mine wiped out over 5 times the starbase fleet power, not even an optimized starbase build.
PD looks stronger than Flak at equivalent level. Because Strike craft counter strike craft and PD is better against explosive weapons.
I'm a new player to Stellaris so I've been waiting to find an updated weapon list xD ..... Thank you, great video!
Can you please include a rating for the general that got the dragonslayer trait by meleeing a dragon to death from his ship in one the tournaments? Gotta be SS tier right?
Is that a real thing? And why on earth would you use a sword when you’ve got a giant laser weapon and long range missiles?
Swords are cool, that's why!
@@MontuPlays laser turrets are cool too
@@art-games6230 Swords are close and personal.
One thing I think worth mentioning is how good strike craft repeatables are. Late game I often find myself having already gotten everything else I need from society tech tree, while I still need stuff in physics/engineering. So it lets me scale them up while researching other tech.
Thanks for the list i dont have a ton of hours in the game so this really helps keep me on an even footing playing with my buddy whos been playing alot longer
I usually go for a combined weapons approach. I put a bit of kinetic on there to bust though shields and then deck the ships out in lasers. Destroyers are basically relegated to PD only.
I want to get better at the game so I'm will state what I think would be a good idea and then learn if it is or not and if not thw reason why.
If you put a single auto-canon on a ship and have the other weapons be effective against armour, then the auto-canon with its quick fire-rate will destroy the shield first, leaving the armour now bare for the other weapons to crack through very quickly.
Therefore, having a single auto-canon on a ship with mostly armour-destroying weapon is a good idea.
While I find some things are correct about this tier list, there is a problem I see with it and that is the basis you are using for the analysis is practically a vacuum which when translated into a game doesn't really applies. When people look at a tier list they do so in order to look at what are the best weapons and then make a fleet based on what is better. For that you can't analyse things in a vacuum, you need to take other things into consideration.
Now you do take armour vs shield into consideration so it's not completly in a vacuum, you also take into consideration looking at what the opponent fleet is. While the first is good, the second isn't and here's why. Generally the AI just uses presets for their fleet compositions, variations tend to be more dependent on what tech they've unlocked thus far than actual preferences set for each empire. What this means is that yes, there will be a variation in tech between enemy empires and of course the crysis and fallen empires, generally speaking the threat of a random empire isn't big and everything can be overcome with having much larger fleets and striking the moment they appear. For that reason it's completly irrelevant to change your fleet to hit better on armor or shields or hull depending on the empire you are fighting, it actually only makes it a pain in the ass and a waste of alloys to be constantly refiting and against things like crysis, it is better to strike the moment they appear. Deal with them before they can gain any momentum which makes refiting to fight them a poor choice.
With that out of the way what we need to base weapon analysis is fleet composition and repeatable tech. Let's stater with repeatable tech.
Repeatable tech makes even a bad weapon the best weapon to use. Onc you have something like +50% to damage and attack speed, a base version with no bonus does not compete with it anymore. Of course we don't want to do that with the worst weapons, we want to do it with the best, however there are caviats. There is no point in investing into both kinetic weapons, energy weapons, missiles and strike craft. You want to focus your research so you only buff the weapons you use.
Second is fleet composition and here you have 2 ways of going, the old way which is only battleships (with a titan per fleet for aura) or mixed fleets. In my opinion the old way is still the better way because anything smaller than a battleship at the end game gets destroyed too easily. In a mixed fleet you are expecting each ship type to have a role and the combined roles is what makes the fleet effective, however battles are not one fight and you're done. You have to fight multiple fights and usually hold the systems for a while so the ground attack forces can capture the planets and that can lead to additional fights. If you lost a lot of weaker ships, your ship composition is now out of balance and your fighting effectiveness has decreased significantly. But if your fleet is all battleships all with the same configuration, lose 3 or 4 battleships and all you lost is some firepower, you are still largely effective. Don't forget that battleships are several times more survival than anything else so you lose a lot less power too just for having them instead of a mixed fleet.
So with this in mind, let's look again at the tier list and reconsider for a moment. What is the most effective weapon on a battleship? Strike craft are the answer. As a big slow moving ship, your major issue are the ships that move fast and deal lots of damage up close, but your strike craft destroys up to destroyer class ships very quickly and effectively. These should be in S tier, not A. Also consider that strike craft intercept other strike craft and so flak artillery is actually not that good on your ships. What you'd want is point defense which is speciaised for missiles since strike craft no longer intercept them. Suddenly that point defense is now solidly into A tier. S tier if we consider that is 1 of the 2 only existing point defenses and the best in slot.
With this in mind, how do we follow up on weapons? Well if we have strike craft, we will have some S and M slots as well and what fits the role best here? Missiles. They have the best range, do good damage and like the strike craft, they bypass shields so this is where we invest next. I do agree with your tiering on the missiles, they are well placed though it's debatable whether tier 5 missiles should be A or S since are small slot, they are not really competing with whirlwind missiles per say.
You also classify every titan weapon very low even though you ideally have 1 titan per fleet and therefore will always have a titan weapon. I'd probably rate them higher since there is only 2 and I'd rate the basic one higher. In most engagements, even longer duration ones you generally only fire it once, maybe twice on the archeotech if it's a very long battle so having the higher damage is generally better and it doesn't uses minor relics. As for the point on whether you will have them in a role or another. I'd consider that a moot point. There is no point in using a titan if not for the aura but that doesn't means we shoul leave it weaponless. That said I would like stellaris to actually give use slot options for titans rather than just all large and titan weapon.
At this point we could debate whether battleships should have a large weapon on the back or medium, we could debate whether they should X weapon on the front or not and debating this would lead us to whether we invest into energy weapon, kinetic weapons or neither. I prefer neither to better focus my research and on that note. Yes, armour is better by default, but looking at my set up, I have engineering repeatables for missiles, society for strike craft and nothing on the physics. This means that I could invest into energy weapons as a thrid, or I could just go shields instead of armour, by doing so my shields will be strong regardless and I don't have to divide my engineering research into missiles and armor thus I am far more effectively gaining power.
The poor titan is the one that comes worst for wear since I won't be buffing it asside from the shields but he's there for the aura anyway.
Now while I did explain my setup, it's important to think how a game realistically sets up how fleets are composed, how repeatables should be focused instead of spread around. These things make tiering quite different than what you made for some of the weapons.
This is excellent
The nano missles were how my 30k fleet took on the entire Great Khan invasion and won with about 22k power left.
I think autocannons + missiles or strikecraft are a strong combination, ACs are worse now that armor is stronger than shields but they still have massive base damage for their size. 12-20 DPS times 0.25 times 0.85 against armor is nothing to write home about, but for a weakness it's better than other weapons against their counter. Being strong against two out of three layers of defense is still great in my book. Huge upgrade from mass drivers (regardless of tier pretty much) for corvettes.
I've been having a blast running fleets of stealth frigates and corvettes and ambushing enemy fleets. Decloak right on top of them so they don't get a chance to use their artillery, knock out their large ships with the frigates, and have the corvettes mop up other corvettes/destroyers. The only downsides are that the low evasion of the frigates means I have to replace a lot of them after every battle and cloaking requires going full armour, but I'm still coming out way ahead alloy-wise.
Disruptors are S tier??? When i used them, they made most of the enemy ships disengage, which caused wars to last forever. (You need to destroy ships to increase war exhaustion of your enemy.) It is no fun to be entangled in drawn-out wars all the time.
One thing to be said about the new meta is that with both energy weapons and armor being so much better weapons, it really allows you to specialise your repeat techs. I get a low amount of shield techs, and then just complete focus on energy weapon repeats in physics. and in engineering i spend 95% of my effort solely on the armor repeat tech.
This list is missing Skravird Strike Craft that you get from Skrand Sharpbeak
Damn, well rip my unsc roll play fleets. Though if the armor buff is still a thing that's a win.
I've actually had a lot of fun putting stormfire autocannons on my torpedo cruisers. They're already rushing in to close range, and by the time they take shields down the torps have wrecked the armor and they can go to work on the hull.
I have been doing something cheeky with the systems that nullify shields if I'm lucky to have it as a choke point, which is just stack a plasma cloaked fleet, and wait for whoever is dumb enough to fly their fleet through. It's great on solo for keeping a good surprise defender in nearby systems.
Has the weapon tier changed with the more recent releases - currently 3.12 Andromeda? Sounds like Stellaris needs to allow Front/Aft/Left/Right/Top/Bottom firing weapons for things like Gigacannon to compensate for the 25% arc.
Not since 3.6, so this list is still pretty in-date
For me it's been, Disruptors for Corvette's and Destroyer's.
Missile Cruiser's on mass paired with Carrier Battleship's with flack and missiles, 1 Battleship per 5 Cruiser's.
I used to love Kinetic weapons...☹️.
I will say for the archeo-weapons if people want to try them is to go with the relic world origin start. You get a building that produces minor artifacts. You can start stockpiling them from day one and get more from exploring ruins while you wait to research the weapon techs. Also taking the perk is a must as not only does it boost the weapons damage but also upgrades all of the archeo-shield/armor techs and upgrades the building mentioned above by giving it two more jobs allowing you to produce more minor artifacts.
The biggest problem I had was the really low storage cap. I was alternating between not being able to store additional artifacts and desperately trying to get more when a fleet that was built up over years got blown up.
@@vgalis i think the Faculty of Archaeostudies increases it but i cant remember. but yeah def an issue
As one of the 100 Stellaris console players in existence looking at this list and knowing what is coming in 2 years time is truly scary
I am quite surprised (and disappointed) that in combat ships do not focus fire different weapons on the most vulnerable enemy. Ex. 20 energy siphons drain shields on enemy ship #1 until it has none left, then all the siphons switch to enemy #2, while lasers shoot ship #1's armor and hull.
How does targeting work then?
35:45 enemy emergency FTL - with pure disruptor corvettes, i basically don't kill anything due to emergency FTL. i also see a lot of emergency FTL with strikecraft
Well, my fighter/missile bias is finally justified. I've always just liked them, now I get rewarded for it
I've often wanted that archtype to be viable and it looks like they work well enough for now ...
Can I pretty please have a chart or list version of this tier list including pros and cons of each? You're the best Montu, even if you can't help me out with my request.
Playing a race starting on a relic world and with a minor artifact mine.
I constantly find other artifact mines while I survey in the beginning.
All acrotech weapons are fine with their upkeep. Of course I went into the Archotech ascension.
Plus putting these on menacing ships waive all non-power/mineral upkeeps.
Keep in Mind that the ancient killer drones do not engage other fighters. So against the grey tempest and certain space bugs, you might want to swap to regular fighters or build in more flak.
I didn’t know that. What is a good counter to FE and Swarm? I used to clown them by year fifty when they had tons of ships but now when they have like six ships they kill two groups of carrier battle ships.
@@thedismayer1196 For me it worked to design 30-50 flak destroyers to fly ahead and distract the fighters until your own fighter are there.
The main ships are weak.
You may even get away with a lot of flak corvettes.
The way I view Ancient weapons is you either put them in your heavy hitter high risk reward admirals that focus on damage output. Or you put them in a fleet that is all about retreating to fight another day
Problem with swarm missiles is that they are considered one missile with lots of health. What would make waaay more sense is if the component actually launched several missiles that individually can be shot down. Because right now you need on average 3+ PD to 1 swarm missile module to remove ALL damage from the swarm missile. If it simply launched e.g. 4 missiles, out of which 2 are shot down and deals thus 50% of its maximum damage, then it makes sense. You can still saturate PD, but you dont straight out bypass all PD.
Would love to see a video about the best ship designs/fleet designs, I still don't know if I should keep some corvettes, frigates and destroyers in the mid/late game or only focus on cruisers and battleships! Anyway great video Mr Montu!
I'd really love some new videos about how to build the different classes of ships with the new balancing. Different fleet compositions for different stages of the game.
just read through the comments here, I've already gotten a few ideas for my next game.
My general fleet designs have been torpedo cruisers with disruptors, missile destroyers in long range fire support, and some form of artillery battleships. After this, I might work my battleships into aircraft carriers so that I have a torpedo spearhead with missile and strike craft support and see how that works. Still need to work out the best setup for defense platforms, though it sort of seems like making noting but swarm missile platforms might just work for simplicity.
However, I feel again you have something of a double standard with how you're rating weapons. Like when talking about the Ancient Driller Drones you make mention of "if you can strip enemies of their shield", yet rank most of the anti-shield weaponry very low and largely recommend against using, and pretty much talk disparately about the anti-shield properties of those weapons that got higher up in the list like it's some asterisk you felt obliged to comment on.
Style-wise, I love the idea of really big kinetic weapons. And I like how lasers look way more than plasma cannons. Outside of multiplayer, it still performs decently against the AI in my experience in commodore difficulty. And its balanced enough that I don't have to do as much work retrofitting 1000s of fleet capacity for new foes.
Same question for you as Strat: What does the Cordyceptic Drones civic do to the tiers of Amoeba Flagella, Scourge Missiles, and Swarm Strikers?
I like a mixed neutron launcher cruiser and kinetic artillery battleship/titan fleet. Line computer on the cruisers to get them out front, artillery computer on the battleships, they tend to line up nasty alpha strikes. Mind I only use one or two fleets like this to supplement my main stacks of torpedo/disruptor cruisers and arc emitter/carrier battleship stacks by the late game.
I used 1 null void on my destroyer at the start of the game. It seemed like they were verry effective in small quantities to rip through their shields quickly. PVE btw.
Archaeo-weapons are what I exclusively arm my Oveseer Hive ships with for my Hive Mind empires if I go for Archaeotech, while my non-Overseer ships languish with "just" normal weapons. Keeps the cost down across the empire.
one quick tip would be the order of the weapon cards for the Macro Batteries was (from left to right) medium-small-large, and would probably be best done as small-medium-large.
Great video though!
Kiting being less viable in general seems to heavily encourage actually having screening ships
"... except that they use minor artifacts" meanwhile me constantly needing to use 500 minor artifacts for science because my storage is maxing out.
yes exactly, either I have too many or too little.
I was surprised with the results. Thank you for suffering through hours of testing just so I could learn exactly which class of weapons to use.
I used to only use lasers mass drivers and missiles, and was totally dismissive of torpedoes. I just recently used the devastator torpedoes recently and oh my god I can never go back.
Versions 3.10 two games have shown in early game I can face AI fleets valued 1/3 more than mine with 1/6th the losses. In both cases the AI used missiles & kinetic: they were ready for shields. I used 2 corvette designs: both with all armor (no shields); 3/4ths of my fleet had kinetic flack + 1energy & 1 kinetic gun. The remaining 1/4 had 2 energy guns & 1 kinetic. I delt six times the damage, shot down nearly all their damage even with my 34 corvettes facing their 50!
I lost 6 ships compared to 25, muahaha. OMG, if I could have met them in a nebula...
I think the armor/shield rebalance was supposed to make kinetic weapons useful for hit-and-run tactics, but bypass weapons are better for that and in the case where hardening becomes a factor you’re better off abandoning hit-and-run altogether.
I love using Energy Siphon and Null Void Beam.
Good to take out shields for my lasers and plasma weapons.
And since they're all energy weapons, I never have to bother boosting kinetic, strike craft and missile repeatables.
The gigachad move of going crisis path in MP, and not investing in encryption. So the entire lobby sees you stack nano-missle cloud launchers in horror!
Mining lasers are better than indicated if you're holding off on blue lasers in order to steer the tech tree, which I do routinely while focusing on missiles & torpedoes. They're excellent critter killers & make your starbases a bit better, since the bases themselves use a mix of energy & kinetic weaponry.
Doesn't -90% ship build cost reduction make the minor artifact cost irrelevant? I mean it makes fleet building trivial in general, but it especially kind of makes that a moot point.
Archeotech ascension perk alongside ancient nano swarm missles & driller drones is ridiculously broken, really easy to win the game if you go crisis as soon as you can put even ONE of those on menacing corvettes
I have to say, I dont even research some of the archaeotech weapons anymore, simply for the fact that I fear that the automation system of starbases puts them on there for no reason other than apparently having high fleet power, though they suck
I honestly wish we'd either get a system to exclude tech from automatic research or being able to customize starbases... and lets be real, the second one was asked for for years, so I guess Im outa luck with this one :
I usually build specialized fleets that complement each other, also bulwark fleets that have high armor and hull
When you add Rubricator + Archaeo-Engineers, all the archaeo-tech weapons go up one rank. Except the ancient macro batteries.
A torpedo battery module on a starbase can give you 2 Proton Launchers at the cost of 37 alloys flat. Sounds a lot better than 1 hangar or a plasma cannon / disruptor combo that the other modules give.
TY for the post!!! I was hoping that a new tier list would appear. I suspect my favorites aren't best but I'm looking forward to what's good vs. other players / Fallen Empires / Crisis fleets / etc.!!
Looks like my favorite designs are in the "meh" class but I guess that's OK with me. BB with FAE, 2 strike craft, some PD, and disruptors for things that get too close. I usually only care about fielding these against Fallen/Awakened/Crisis empires where they seem to do at least OK. Given the issues with shields I may play with more armor-centric approaches and see where that gets me.
Specialize a specific ship or a few that deal aoe shield damage mixed into your fleet and a major amount of armor melting ships and lots of corvets with shield caps.