I want to see a meme build where you deliberately make the worst species and empire possible. It would be fun watching you try to win with pure F tier stuff.

Important note: Make sure you actually have enough weapon range before you put an artillery computer on something. I still remember watching my fleet die of embarrassment as they got picked apart by strike craft while staying too far away to fire their own weapons.

I use the carrier combat computers on my Titans and Juggernaut. Not only does it allow my fleets to engage from farther away, stopping enemy fleets from escaping, letting my strike craft spawn sooner, but it prevents them from charging ahead of the battleships and getting destroyed.

One of my biggest gripes with Stellaris, for 6 years game we still have luckluster amount of components/weapons, I'm hoping sooner or later they will do big expansion that will focus on revamping the fleets and whole combat, luckily we have mods for that, but as always the official content is better :)

the Null void beam is great for dealing with the Unbidden actually, you can snipe their shields down across the system, it actually saved me on one of my playthroughs

I wish devs would give us alternatives to Perdition Beam, feels bad when you have only one choice of huge weapon on your Titans with no variability at all

Disruptors are great in defense stations places around LGates. When ships appears they are immediately in range.

I really like afterburners because sublight speed contributes hugely to travel speed. So not only you can decide if you will engage or not but also moving across galaxy is quicker which means that fleet can do more for the same cost.

It just occurred to me that the cool down of the weapons is measure in days. Like a 7 second cool down weapon takes a week to load and fire again. That's a funny detail to me.

-Afterburners I suspect will be largely obselete w/ the overlord expansion with the introduction of Hyper Relays -Strike Craft are also very good at clearing fortifications w/ the exception of Ion Cannons, also if the targets are spread out you get the 'dance of the strike craft' where your strike craft fly back and forth between targets doing little damage while they destroy your fleet. Particularly noticable when clearing Marauder systems

The worst part about the automatic ship building feature is that the game AI seems to heavily favour Disrupters. Making it really annoying for newer players. When I first started I was confused when my fleet power went down from upgrading my fleet, only to find out the game had added lots of Distrupters to my build.

My main gripe with your titan video is the same as this one. Titans become much more survivable with the carrier combat computer. It keeps them in the back of the fleet and allows battleships to soak up the damage first.

I'll be honest the only thing that would make me excited for a stellaris 2 is that they could build the combat and ship designers from the ground up and expand on it. I would love a massive dlc for it now but they've talked about how it would require a lot of work that might not be worth it and that's unfortunate. I'd love more variety in ship design, more weapons, more defenses and modules. That and an expansion of the combat systems would be phenomenal

So this explains why none of your ship designs have PD. I usually put point defense on my destroyers.

I always put afterburners on my cruiser fleets because I need them to catch enemy corvette/destroyer fleets, I just like to go fast.

made it through most of the vid so far sir, i like how much detail you go into about your opinions, helps me understand things better

*TFW Montu completely trashes your favorite builds on Stellaris because every part you use is F or C-tier* (Which said build is: Energy weps with balanced mixes of shields/armor)

Regenerative hull tissue heals ships which weren't damaged in N days, I believe. I think I saw ships healing in combat because they weren't hit, and certainly have seen disengaged ships heal! Press the Attack!

The question would be if you're trying to maximize your energy weapon output, you'll always be fitting lances anyways because they'll be upgraded further than mega cannons. Why would you ever try to tech both paths? Also, I'd like to hear your take on sapient vs precog computers....

I was sitting here and happy with myself that your list mirrors my most common build, and then I remembered where I learned said build. Thanks for another awesome video.

Wohoo ! So far I tried to listen to your advices and my own ideas in Stellaris while designing my ships, this guide will be helpful for my Universal Union save.

“Orbital trash compactors are bad” *yes but they’re funny*

"Point defense will not destory all incoming missiles" I dunno, in my experience even mass corvette swarms will usually see literally 0% hit rate on their missiles just because the enemy has a little bit of point defense. Though, maybe that was more strike craft than PD.

When I see your videos all I can think if is "players will find a way to optimize the fun out if a game"

While thrusters may not be all that useful in a head to head fight, they are incredibly useful maneuverability. Being able to catch fleets, run away, or get to a system before your enemy can be hugely important.

Photon torpedoes being an energy weapon and not a torpedo tilts me so hard. Also the fact PD/Flak is useless is also irritating.

I've been binging of your videos explaining tiers and ship designs and would love to see your take on building an economy, something I've been struggling with since megacorp's release. The Terran Empire needs your advance knowledge

Hey Montu. Thank you very much. About two weeks ago I actually asked for this video on the discord and I'm very glad to see it done. I have no words, so here is my comment, you have my like and always my sword. Keep the good work.

I would've put the Enigmatic Encoder in C since the Advanced Afterburners increase speed, which I find to be exceptionally useful for larger ships like Battleships and Titans.

One consideration for late game is that, at least in my experience, energy weapons and shields can get way more repeatables in than whatever you pick in engineering (though the exact magnitude of the difference likely affected by all the extra techs from mods I use) . So if I had to pick between say, a Giga Cannon with five 5% increases in damage and firing rate, and a Tachion Lance with twice as many increases or more, that might change things.

Man, I was waiting for this tier list for like 5 years so far )) great job

I made it through ! Thank you for taking the time to give your thoughts (in detail) about all of this :)

In the endgame disrupters are superb because shields and armor grow endless over time.

It’s nice to see they massively buffed Regenerative Hull Tissue. I was running it even without the buffs, since natural repair is always good on campaign. However, with the new buffs, it has made it comically powerful.

Really good video Montu, i always had love how you do this in a methodological way. I think that point defense could be really useful in the mid game if the Grey Tempest arrive, kind of early, since they can be countered in their damage output. Of course you'll need to take them down so the rate in your overall offense could be something like 70% damage ships and 30% defense ships, as always.

I'm over a year late, but I can't express how much this video has helped me to understand the nuances between weapons and auxillary components. Story time: I just finished my first ever playthrough of the game on the easiest settings since this is the first time I've ever played a 4x game. I generally left it up to the AI to determine which components were best to put on my ships and had relatively great success, until the mid-late game... For some reason, the AI absolutely LOVES disrupters and throws them on everything it can, which ended up causing me to lose battles where I should've overpowered the opponent's fleet by 20k. I ended up going with a plasma thrower and gauss cannon hybrid (I only played through the base game for my first playthrough) and saw that I was easily winning battles I used to lose. Your video better explains why that change did end up working as what I essentially had was a basic complementary weapon setup. Complete game changer right here. I also noticed that the AI really struggles with base building as it chooses bizarre modules for starbases and planets. For example - I think the building is called consumer complex, the one that increases housing slots - the AI would build like 4 of them per a planet which meant I had to go through 10+ planets and fix them. They also tend to overvalue agricultural districts which meant I had a 1k+ surplus food income. I guess they really want to make sure their people don't go hungry? I also ran into the issue that one of the opponents in my game shot up in total power just by vassalizing 2 of the strongest empires halfway through the game. I was so confused as to how I couldn't keep up with this empire despite rushing tech, having 17 planets, and 1.3k fleet size. Needless to say I learned a VALUABLE lesson about diplomacy. Finally, I finally came across the fallen empires and one of them ended up awakening prematurely. All I have to say is... HOW ARE YOU MEANT TO TAKE DOWN A NEARLY 500K POWER FLEET??! Like seriously, this one empire wiped out everyone including the Unbidden with just a single fleet. I was so sad watching my empire quickly crumble as nearly 1m+ of military power did nothing to even slow this dude down.

Just like the energy siphon is like a tier 0 auto cannon, the mining laser seems like a predecessor to plasma weapons, at least in the way it’s particularly weak against shields but powerful against armor and hull.

If I'm not mistaken, regenerative hull tissues do work during battle. I recently had a fun Crisis run where my Star Eaters had 4 of those and the enemy fleet weren't able to damage my monsters faster than they could heal ^^

I just hopped back into Stellaris, and your videos help make sense of a lot of stuff I never even knew I didn’t understand!

Thanks Montu, loved it!

PD should be C. You gave two situations were it becomes extremely useful. Null Voids are decent anti shield until Kinetic Launcher become available. Amoeba are the best strike craft until T3, the low accuracy can easily be countered by target and combat computers. Nanite Repair should be viewed economically and be placed in F tier. I've had several games where either the Scavenger or not a single Nanite resource spawned, making this an unobtainable, useless module.

Minor mistake on the regenerative tissue : it works while in battle. Meaning a fleet at a lower power can win a fight against a much stronger fleet if it knocks out enough fire power. Which is fun to watch, when you aren't the one fighting the immortal :)

Watched every minute, great stuff!

This was awesome, a culmination of so much previous work and knowledge. Thanks a bunch Montu! P.S could we see a ships/vessels Tier list? I'm curious where you think stations, titans & juggernauts etc fall.

Oh we are still here. Do you REALLY think WE are going to do all of this testing ourselves? You give the good info

as someone who mostly ends up fighting ai, i've gotta agree with the take on the carrier combat computers as that's exactly how i use them my typical battleship fleet is artilly/carrier hybrids which i've found to better counter the ai's standard fleet composition and with one ship using the carrier computer it really has changed some battles i've fought by deploying fighters early or catching a fleet as it's fleeing from the direct opposite side of the system

Really enjoyed the longer format

Iam really thankful for your Vid on this matter as it is hard to discern for a beginner on what weapons (and technologies) to choose from without having extensive experience in battles.

personally for "realism balance" i think all missiles need a range buff to have at least as far range as x slots or even higher. and the carrier computer should buff missiles as well.

To be honest, I really wish they would buff cloud lightning, considering how much trouble it takes to eliminate those void clouds in the early-mid game (and let's face it, they look bloody cool), they deserve some love.

I always make it to the end of your videos, and i am brand new to the channel and the game. So great content! So much to learn with this game

Made it to the end thanks so much for all your hard work

Mild disagree on Disruptors. They're pretty atrocious, but they do have their uses unlike the others in F tier. Disruptors are at their best when either used in or against evasion stack fleets and when used in bomber fleets. It takes a *very* small amount of Corvettes armed with Torpedoes and Disruptors to cause actual hell in a war, particularly a Total War situation where their wins claim stars instantly, and Corvettes fly much much faster than main combat fleets. Because torpedoes already disregard shields, you want a weapon that goes directly for either armor or hull, bypassing shields to capture Starbases as quickly as possible. Autocannons also require getting close and would waste a number of shots on the shields. Normal weapons engage from further but also waste shots on the shield. Because *you do not have many corvettes* if you're doing raider squads, since too many eats into your battleships instead of being something you quickly build just before a war starts and send out to take stars and die and too many of them would ramp war exhaustion too much if they get caught, you don't have the killing power to just casually cut through starbase shields. Likewise, 90% evasion Destroyers (thank you psionics) that are acting as a screen for battleships typically want disruptors. In both cases, they're probably of the Menacing flavor instead of standard, as both are meant to be cheap, disposable, and highly annoying. Something you build from your shipyards in the middle of a war and throw into a meatgrinder to protect your valuable assets. Disruptors excel on these sorts of harassment/fodder ships. Hull damage weakens enemy ships, but disruptors can't kill for crap. So stick them on raiders and cannonfodder that exist to harass and frustrate instead of actually fight. Early on or not as crisis, Corvettes with torps and disruptors to raid the enemy backline. Later on, menacing destroyers with torps and disruptors to do the same and also serve as blockers for your main fleets that you just throw in front as a suicide wall.

I find Cloud Lightning useful on Battleships to counter the Contingency, with their huge shield and armour boost, the bypassing of them that CL gives along with the Arc Emitter takes the fleet down pretty effectively. Granted the damage is a bit spikey, but I've found I get less losses with it vs the traditional Giga + Neutron BS loadout.

Hehe. Came to see it all. So yea. At A list now and still here. xD Great Tier list. Love it. Had a discussion with a friend about wepons. And you seem to have tested your way to what I thought would be the best anyway (with a few diffs where I see I was wrong now). ;)

Good list! Really good guide for people who do not really understand the ins and outs of ship combat very well.

My physics research tends to be so much more developed over my engineering research that if I can get null void research I'll include it on my vessels with extra laser and plasma weapons over mass drivers. The exception is the giga canon.

I agree with most things here, but afterburners are A tier hands down. People tend to forget about guerilla warfare. Speedy bois can be very oppressive against opponents attempting to doomstack. They may slowly creep forward and alphastrike everything in their way, but once they are halfway into your empire, they have no systems left. When opponents forget to get strike craft and FTL inhibitors many small fleets of missile corvettes can be extremely annoying to deal with, especially to wide empires. This may of course change a lot with the new expansion :) Excited to see how things will turn out!

Great video as always. I always get so overwhelmed with all of the options available, so, Tier List aside, it was nice to just have all of them described, pros and cons, clear cut. One thing I love for Stellaris is that, even though there are 'meta' builds, there are options just for flavor. Because why not? It's better to give that choice than to not, and that's why Stellaris is such a good game! :D

Was waiting for a vid like this

My greatest wish is that accuracy overflow would start increasing range - could make those modules much more effective/valuable.

Made it through the whole vid, like usual lol. I always have this disagreement with friends though. I'm a huge, huge proponent of mixed navies. Everyone loves going corvette neutron swarm and frankly, I HATE the mechanics of the neutron launcher. Something that powerful should not strike instantly. Being a proponent of mixed navies, my destroyers are often kitted out in point defense with the +tracking computers. Two flak batteries and a missile PD. People always, always, always go for big ass groups of carrier battleships and neutron corvettes. I bring my own carriers, but usually at a 2-1 or 3-1 arty-carrier ratio. And in fights, I clean up fleets significantly more often than I lose. I know it's anecdotal but the after action reports from large engagements, seeing an enormous amount of fighters/missiles destroyed by proper PD weapons is satisfying as hell and the fact I just took far less damage because I'm not relying on fighters that bypass shields and slow firing, OP neutron launchers. Because of carrier combat computers increased engage range, my corvettes zoom out to meet theirs, and since they're neutron launcher build, I honestly don't know if 0% tracking if they even fire neutron launchers against my corvettes. If they do, it's going to almost be a 100% waste of a shot, if they don't, then no damage taken. My corvettes tie up theirs, our fighters have met and the destroyers are moving ahead tend to back up my fighters, wiping out the enemy fighter group and now sit in the middle, taking shots at corvettes and intercepting missiles, while my 50-50 or 75-25 artillery/neutron battleships with nearby cruiser support to help clean up neutron corvettes. My fighters don't usually survive in high enough numbers to do a really noticeable amount of damage, but they did their job of tying up enemy fighters for my PD to get there and destroy the enemy fighters, while my corvettes are going ham on their empty carrier battleships, and slowly reloading neutron launcher ships. The destroyers and cruisers don't take too long to get stuck in with the boyz, and because of the ship type, destroyers evade a lot of damage, and cruisers jump away much of the time, if they survive the first shot. These kinds of fights can be absolutely brutal vs cruisers. But, in the end, I'm now in control of the system, and when I hit f10 and 'Reinforce All', I'm not rebuilding a bunch of battleships, mostly smaller, far more expendable ships while my battleships tend to survive because other ships soaked so much damage. Not saying it's fool-proof, I get rekt plenty of times like everyone else, but I tend to have my capital ships around longer. Which means more dmg or enough time to manually disengage, meaning my capital ships have a pretty good survival rate. I also tend to go with the Rapid Deployment doctrine for even more sublight speed, letting my corvettes and destroyers get into their proper positions. They tend to favor Hit and Run or go Rapid like I do. Same reasoning that my star fortresses often have cheap defensive platforms full of PD weapons. People love to engage out of range with fighters. But four or five PD platforms with two or three hanger platforms cleans up the fighters, letting mine fly out and harass their ships, which often lack PD. Yeah, I end up investing a bit of alloy into platforms when it could be in a fleet, but the fleet isn't there yet, the platform is actively engaging already. And I'm not implying my starbases will survive against determined late game fleets, just that it buys me extra time and kills off a chunk of their damage before my fleets even engage. Plus, I've watched your videos, I know how to rake in alloys. 😉 Also, I don't know if it's contrarian or not but to me, meta is boring. By its nature it's predictable. I like messing up plans. Though the sensor change is going to mess up my plans a bit, switching the make-up with fleet positioning at high intel. Another bonus, I can make the espionage system work for me. It's not great, or particularly dynamic. But when players actively skip the encryption and decryption techs, I get better intel faster, making better counter ships, and pouncing on unsuspecting fleets. Which is always fun. Also to note, we're nowhere near as good as y'all, so that might be why my fleet comps can still work. Love your stuff, love that you encourage us to leave comments and ideas instead of shutting down with "you can't argue with the math, sorry." Course, even my love for balanced fleets goes out the window when it comes to roleplaying my empire. All balance goes out the window. When RP'ing as an extremely oppressive empire, I'll even take the espionage tradition tree. Though it hurts the soul a little bit still.

I'm considering getting this game as it's sale on steam and yeah these videos are really helpful so cheers for the upload

Excellent video!!!

I think this table was a flawed way of showing the tiers. A graph of tier versus time would have been much better. For example PD are great when taking on stations early on as you will take zero damage, however when long range weapons appear and ships wholly eclipse stations later, they are redundant. Similarly other items can be great when you first get them but then decline in usefulness.

See the reason why, for me, I disagree with armor and reactor booster placement is because I play single player and I’m usually very near my naval capacity so I need to maximize what each ship can do. I’d have reactor boost in C and armor maybe up one, but it should still be below crystal. But from an MP perspective it makes a lot of sense although I sometimes wonder if it would be good to run armor in MP since everyone is expecting and equipping their ships to counter shields. Also made it to the end ✌🏻I always do though I like your videos.

I appreciate this content. This knowledge will not stop me from creating several specialist class ships of each type suited for one purpose and one purpose only. But knowing this is useful if I ever actually wanna meta my game, which I generally don't because being overpowered gets boring really fast. Loving the content, would love to have a reply, but you're probably too busy.

Montu, I have been lost on how to build components (aside from general counterpicking) for so dang long, I have over 1100 hours in this game and still I see like no community discussion about this so I have been lost. Thank you so much

Banger

I feel like 20% sublight speed can still be a really good reason to use afterburners even on battleships. Moving fleets around is ass sometimes.

Thank you for the tier list! I found it an interesting watch even if I don't really intend to play in an 'optimized' way.

Also, one point for the disruptors and cloud lightning is that they have the advantage that damage to hull reduces dps, meaning that despite not doing the same amount of dmg as you would with other, weapons you can reduce the enemies damage output. Also very good on corvettes (the disruptors), especially late game.

Paradox should balance the missiles so players use point defence and armor

Ah yes. 40 minutes of Montu explaining why Giga cannons are op

long videos are the best, don’t ever apologize, thanks for all your content

love the tier lists montu mate grateful... any chance though you could include your cursor or highlight the icons as it would be useful for newer players seeing these lists that arnt familiar with the subjects being listed...

Meta: armor just isn't worth it compared to shields! Me: *laughs in pulsar chokepoint systems*

Thrusters C tier lol. No one expects a speed battleship catching up and mogging their fleet

Fairly new stellaris player here. Probably only 200 hours in. Would love to see a video explaining fleet compositions and different ways to build/counter other types of fleets. Generally play with a few friends and they tend to just go titan and a bunch of battleships. Love your min/ max content keep it up. Also an episode on how you should develop the planets in your empire and how to decide what you should be doing/prioritizing to achieve specific end game goals. Thanks for all the effort in your videos!

I liked how you encouraged commenting based on content rather than just begging. I know that 3.6 is about to change everything but I do really appreciate this video as I am still just a beginner those not a novice atm.

With the changes to fleet combat, will we get an updated tier list?

I think you really overlooked the fact that Psi Shields cost Zro, in my experience not coming across any zro in a game even close to 2375 can really make them suck in a way since you cannot even use them, similar to the nanite systems, also I personally love strike craft thematically and i like carrier type ships but something that really sucks about them is thier AI, they like to dance around the system retargeting alot making them functionally do nothing. Also wtf is dragon scale armor? ive never seen that before and i have like 1k hours of stellaris

Hey man, you specifically asked who made it to the A tier...I watched through the entire thing. I have been getting back into Stellaris, started playing multiplayer with some friends, and have been eagerly looking at overlord...your videos have helped with all of that. Thanks Montu!

Nice list!

Did you forget the Psionic Barriers, the lesser version of Psionic Shields? What do you think of these?

"If a planet is so heavily defended, its probably better to Crack it anyway", people trying to defend their planet? Well then just blow it up, classic stellaris things.

Ive found the Null Void Beam to be rather useful specifically if you use them in more numerous M slots, paired with L slot Plasma for Cruiser and lower. (S slot into M slot also works nicely) The slow difference is both efficent in terms of how you have to build your ship segments, and because it keep the range of the Null Void Beam higher than the Plasma

Very useful. Thank you.

point defense guns are cool. im willing to pay alloys to be cool.

when you have weapons that do massive damage against hulls, it is really important to have armor even if it's expensive

What a lot of people tend to not get is that picket computer in missle corvetes can make a lot of sense since that gives those missles / torpedoes a really good tracking boost (in particular when you also have a decent level of sensor tech). Depends on whther you need tracking of course.

I've been using auto-build for my ships since I've started recently I'm definitely gonna go tinker with it a lot now after this vid.

I wish they'd allow us more customization with the ships. Let us decide how many components we want in the front, middle and rear of the ship for increasing costs.

Weapons not doing enough damage? Just do more damage smh, literally that easy

Made it to the end! Saw that coming :D

If you put Carrier Computers on a Titan, they won't take the early hits in engagements and you're more likely to keep your Aura + slow to replace ship through a long campaign. Also Afterburners seem to be under-valued. Early game, speed can allow you to pick favorable fights, avoid bad fights and get defensive fleets to star bases before they fall.

U better have put thr null void beams High up there they are fucking broken I have beat battle ships v battle ships with them having more battle ships with null void beams

thank you for your guide 😊

Hey man great video as usual. Have you ever thought about doing videos like this for some of the more popular mods in the workshop? I know you could get a bunch of videos out of say Gigastructures just by itself. Would be very interesting to see how you would rate the things they add into the game.

Great video! Can you do one for technology and what in your opinion, is the general technology tier list and which are best to rush and which are best to ignore etc?