Finally! A guide to tell me how to build my ships. So far, I've only been slapping on weapons on my ships because I "think they're neat".

How I make my ships 1) sections "well i feel that having 2 cannons looks better than 3, it just feels more natural" 2) Weapons "so do i want to see flashy laser effects or bullets being shots in space?" yeah i ignore missiles very often just because they don't look as cool 3) Armor\shield\utility "click on auto-complete" Perfection.

15:24 "You are going to be losing a lot of ships" You underestimate my Alpha strike, dear sir. I won't lose ships if the enemy never reach weapon range on my ships.

"Missiles aren't good" Not anymore they're not, I still remember the days of the macross missile massacre deathball, those days were fun, y'know if you were the one with the deathball.

For anyone wondering this is still pretty relevant. Found out after translating the german down below.

23:02 remember, juggernauts can Switch Layouts themselves, so the munitions plant is actually used sometimes in lategame against Bunker worlds, If you dont want to Go with a colossus for your ascension perk.

*_*Sees Warhammer 40k in the thumbnail*_* Yeah, this is going to be a good video.

Step 1: Add more Dakka Step B: If you think you have enough Dakka, you do not have enough Dakka

15:39 I've never heard of the force disparity mechanic, thanks!

I managed to get a friend back in the game (last time he played was pre Utopia just to help understand the thing) and all of your recent guides have been VERY helpful to help him without making me lose my sanity. Now I can finally have an efficient way of helping him with ship design (which seems to be the part he struggles the most with, though I still told him about the destroyer + Tachyon Battleship, it still is a pretty hard task to teach ngl)

Perdition Beam on Titans and Stations doesn't have a weapon type and thus doesn't get repeatable bonus damage.

25 Battleships with Arc Emitters make citadel bastions no longer matter! XD

Thanks. I’ve been looking for a all in one guide that actually explains why options are good and how the mechanics work.

Im so terrible at making ships. Definitely needed this so I can finally experiment with military instead of always being peaceful.

arch emitters plus cloud lighting on mass battleship fleets is always a win. Wins against fallen empires all the time.

Me: watches this video. Me: Playing Stellaris 3 hours later Me: How did I have to build my Battleships again? My brain: No idea, just slap a Mega Cannon on it, it'll be fine

Thanks for making this - been waiting for an updated guide on this for ages!

Thanks for making this, been waiting for a fleet design guide!

Honest to god learned so much from this vid. Didn’t know how evasion and tracking and reduced damage worked and so much more. Thank you!

For my battleships, I always slap the 1 hangar on there with 2 artillery segments for a combination of fighters and neutrons. Never had a problem winning with that.

I follow the principle of "more daka" when designing my ships, wich nis know as the art of solving problems by unloading as many rounds of ammunition as possible.

From my experience, the loss of hull HP in term of dps is neglectable compared to the saved alloys you gain by using cristal plating, making the ship cheaper and more likely to live another day through disengagement. the only downside is hull is not affected by repeatable and neutron launcher do hit hard on hull.

Amazing video, I've been following your channel for a while now, and today was the first time I got really late into the game, and wanted to design better ships, and this guide was the first result when I searched, was kinda impressed by my luck lol

This is a great video! I'm going to watch it again and take notes... so much good info.

60 hours in and I finally understand how ship designs work. Thanks! Now I might be able to not be forced into subjugation wars within the first fifty years.

Never knew about the Force Disparity effect. Thank you ❤

This actually helped out a lot, I finally understand all of the stats

Pretty good guide but I wish you had talked more about all of the weapons(what weapons are ok/terrible/best and why)(For example why are misiles better than lasers, plasma throwers or gauss cannons) or the ai settings for ships( which setting is the best for what setup)

From my experience, Arc emitter battleships with carrier cores remains a solid option for the later part of the game as a standby configuration, as the AI likes to throw a lot of smaller ships at me still, while the arc emitter does it's thing. As fights drag on, the strike craft remain effective at ignoring shields and getting through armor of tougher enemies, meaning the arc emitters aren't all they rely on. Plus they have the PD necessary to handle torpvette spam. Sure, they may lose to a dedicated giga-neutron battleship, but it tends to trounce everything else, and numbers can make up the difference against such ships. They're also strong counters vs both the contingency and the unbidden. So.. yeah.

This is what i have been waiting for

Omg I was looking for a video like this for a long time :))

One thing to mention in regards to weapons is that you want to have a combo or variety of both kinetic, energy and explosive if possible. The each get their own bonuses with tech and decisions. And being Stellaris they stack. Meaning that if you have a ship that puts out 500 damage with all energy weapons, if you add just a single kinetic weapon to it, then suddenly it has 800-1000 damage. Its been tested on various forums and in combat a fleet with combo weapons always wins.

As a new player, all of your videos have been such a huge help. Thanks for your content!

Thank you for the guide! Finally a video after which I do not need to restart the game!

Was waiting for this thanks!

I watched the whole thing, thank you. I now know how to design ships well.

Great video, but could you do a part 2 that goes in depth on fleet compensation. Also how to spec your fleets to counter the games major threats, khan, grey tempest, each fallen/awakened empire and for each end game crisis.

I was sooo waiting for this!

I've only ever had the Auto-Generate box checked since the games release. Finally. FINALLY! A coherent, in depth guide to make my own ships

The perfect video at the perfect time for a console peasant like myself.

03:01 Nice

Looks like I’ve been designing my capital ships suboptimally. I often add kinetic artillery to balance out the anti-shield vs anti-armor damage. Although I suppose suboptimal designs don’t matter that much if you have 10 times the enemy’s fleet strength and 10 times the enemy’s alloy production...

Awesome - all my ships thank you!! ⭐

I'm only 1:13 into this video, and I've learnt something fairly crucial. I've always just mega-stacked Hull Points because they are both cheaper and gives more 'effective hit points'. I didn't realize combat effectiveness scaled with % HP

Thank you so much for the guide!

Really nice, thanks for the informative video. Although it would be nice to also mention the best fleet compositions.

I generally design my ships with synergy in mind, i.e; I make ships good at dissolving shields and ships good at melting armour. Then I’d equip faster and smaller craft with hull tearing weapons. Most enemy fleets melt in seconds. I do also sometimes add ‘auxiliary’ weapons on some should their counterpart be destroyed so there is still some independence if you will. Edit: typo

Another great video man!

Great Video, the only thing that I feel could have used more detail are the combat-computers. You can do a lot of different fleet-setups with them, like having your small ships rush in to do damage with S and M weapons while your Large Ships "snipe" from the back, or have your whole fleet without large weapons at all(works suprisingly well). And having a Fleet only focused on Long-Range is just op, if you have good tech you can destroy half of an equally powerful fleets health before even getting a single hit. Many of my friends were confused about what to do with combat-computers when they started playing, and I feel like many beginners are as well. I think it would be interesting to have a Video with your thoughts on Fleet composition(Wich ship-designs to put together in a fleet, how many of each ship-type etc.) and more details on combat-computers.

Great vid thanks mate, but your audio is very bassy/muffled. I had to use the close captions just to understand you without turning it up very loud or filtering it. Just wanted to let you know but thank you for someone finally posting a ship build video! :)

I have 3000 hours on Stellaris, and I disagree with your views on No Retreat. I playtested it, two empires fighting with equally sized and equipped fleets, then repairing and fighting again until one is completely destroyed. One empire had No Retreat, the other had Hit and Run tactics, and the No Retreat won every time. The 33% fire rate bonus allows the No Retreat fleet to do far more damage to the other one, thereby decimating it before it could take any severe losses, and the Hit and Run always took more casualties because of that. In my opinion, it also depends on your playstyle. If you don't heal your fleets after every battle and instead opt to simply charge forwards and claim a victory as quickly as possible, then disengagement doesn't really matter: the disengaged ships will be dead anyways after a few battles. So, going for a full blitzkrieg means that you should probably go No Retreat. It is a bit of a risk though, as one battle can destroy your entire fleet, but as long as you avoid taking these risks, you should be okay.

Best ship guide on youtube tbh you earned a sub, and maybe for the next guide you could talk about buding counter fleets to major galactic threats like the crisis or the fallen empires or the horrors, dreadnought etc

Nice guide ! Appreciate that :D Will you make a guide about fleet builds ?

Thanks Stefan. I'm on a crash course of all the details I skipped, like this and getting the most out of your pops, before I join my first SCM game :D

I am learning Stellaris so thank youtube for recommend this video and the one who make it, I usually auto-create it....

Great expansion to your original series. I've been running around with loads of strikecrafts in the late game and wondering why it's not working... now I know.

Excellent video! Just what I was hoping to see, you've really been putting out phenomenal content lately. One question though, I myself have noticed (in addition to some folks on the stellaris subreddit) that late game empires as of 2.6.1 (and beyond) have been running many more mixed fleets than normal. Even in the late 2300s I've seen mixes of well built battleships and destroyers, among other compositions. This means that battleship only fleets with the neutron launcher set up are less well equipped. Should we alter fleet composition accordingly (e.g. producing say a mix of corvettes and battleships in a single fleet to deal with small and large) or should we still produce battleship monofleets but with multiple battleship types (e.g. the neutron launcher setup as one but maybe a strike craft heavy battleship as another to deal with the smaller ships)?

Always run in late game only fleets 1 titan 26 arc emitter battleships with 50/50 kinetic/neutron.

Lol I thought disengagement chance is bad all this time, great vid!

just fyi: carrier cruisers get killed by a same strength corvette swarm very easily, you do not want them as your backbone in the early game. they are still strong, just make sure to keep the enemy at range with other ships.

Awesome video, just what I needed, started the game yesterday. Do you have any resource I can use to better determine which weapons to use? Like a Build list or best in slot Tier list I can have open next to the game. Also, is there a good video that explains fleet composition and how to manage fleets? What size do I want, how many do I need? Do I mix different classes or have a fleet per type? How often do I upgrade my ships. Do I have a single outfitting for all ships with the same class or different ones active at once? Fleet composition and Ship design is probably the most difficult part to learn at the beginning.

The "bow" (front) of a ship is pronounced as the "bow" in, "I bow before the king" not as in, "I nock an arrow in my bow"

12:42 "Although, to be completely honest, Kinetic Artillery is being made obsolete by the existance of Neutron Launchers. These things are just so much better." Neutron Launchers are the new Tachyon Lance (pre-1.3/Heinlein days) confirmed! Which brings me to another topic: 19:47 I remember someone over in the Paradox forums saying that extra large weapons' charge-up time is significant enough that a BB's L-slot guns will already have fired by the time the X does and hence declared Battleships with four KA's to strip the enemy's shields in the opening salvo and one Tachyon for the bonus armor/hull damage the "ultimate/meta BB" (barring very late-game Cloud Lightning/Arc Emitter designs), in stark contrast to your proposed Giga Cannon + Neutron Launchers. Granted, that was long enough ago that I couldn't tell you exactly when that statement was made other than it was at some point after Megacorp/2.2 in one of those threads where people did isolated ship-class A vs. ship-class B testing scenarios ten times over and shared their results. My question is thus: Is Kinetic Artillery, or are BB's with KA + Tachyon still viable in 2.6.3 'Verne', if not in a straight up fight against their "mirror-design", then at least against any common types of Cruisers and whatnot? 14:12 Isn't the issue with Cruisers that they are neither as evasive as Corvettes (and potentially Destroyers), nor as durable as Battleships, and thus effectively do not benefit from their increased Disengagement Chance, because they get destroyed before it could even trigger? There's a whole 'nother thread about that (as of 2.2.7) over at Paradoxplaza titled "What's wrong with cruisers?" that deals with this issue and the apparent problem of them being near-useless once BB's get fielded, as opposed to Corvettes or Destroyers that remain(ed) relevant up until the late-game as Torpvettes and Point Defense DD's, although I suppose that last bit might have changed with Strike Craft being good at screening against SC/Torps now.

Great vid! One thing to keep in mind with Titan auras is that if you have multiples of the same, they do not stack. Also good ones for your ships (e.g. the tracking and firing rate ones) only affect the ships in the Titan's fleet, not every ship you own in the system.

Thank you so much for this

One more thing to consider when outfitting your fleet is that using energy weapons only allows you to focus on researching only energy weapons tech, which means more research effort for useful engineering techs like minerals, which will result in more research and alloys

Is it advisable to have different ship types in a fleet or to have just the strongest types? Thanks in advance.

Just an additional thing ive noticed about the weapon range buffs, once I hit endgame and fight the Prethoryn Scourge specifically I usually take my destroyers out and use only battleships with as much range as possible and some carriers and point defense corvettes set to stay with the battleships to protect them from the scourges op swarm strikers. With as many range buffs as I can get, I put my fleet at the very far end of a system opposite of where I think a scourge fleet will come from, this enables me to usually defeat a fleet three times my size with only moderate losses as the Prethoryn are some of the slowest enemies in game.

I generally use missiles and disruptors (and cloud lightning when possible). Enemy ships are dead pretty much immediately.

I usually just end up running 100 corvettes with disruptors and torpedoes + 25 battleships with arc emitters and the other weapons depending on what the enemies are using.

Thanks for this guide! As a new player I was also following the "what looks cool" way of building ships. One question, tho: Does it make any difference to equip the ship segments with only armor/shield? I have been equipping both on all my ship segments, because I though maybe they all register damage separately, thus not wanting to expose my middle segment for example to damage that shields can negate, etc. Is there such a "hidden" mechanic in the game? Or the stats and damage taken are calculated for the ship as a whole?

Thank you, very helpful

9:20 The Neutron Launchers are good but they will *NOT* get to their target "immediately". They are actually quite slow projectiles, and energy weapons or other kinetic weapons can kill a ship before the Neutron balls hit their target, even if they're being fired after the Neutron Launchers. This can be used to your advantage, for instance having something that depletes shields even if it's slightly shorter range, depending on the speed of the ship and weapon type of course. This way your balls of Neutrons will reach their targets after their shield is gone, to optimize damage. Then, if you did everything perfectly, the shield-depleting weapon will have a new target before it fires again; a target with a shield; as the previous target was destroyed by the Neutron balls. End-game, in a Federation large-ship-only setup for instance, I have 50/50 Carriers/Battleships and 50/50 Carrier-Battleship/Titan ratio. Then spam Carrier/Battleships once Titans are maxed. X weapon is Gigacannon, L weapons are Neutron Launchers, and I could probably swap even 1 L per Battleship to be shield depleting or even Void Beam! The best way to learn is just to observe countless of battles and what happens. Corvettes and Destroyers are kind of obsolete late game but also not. They're fantastic fodder and cheap replacements, to soak up damage that MAY kill your large ships otherwise. I would NEVER run a large-ship only fleet without plenty of Strike Craft. Corvettes and Destroyers are more effective than Strike Craft against enemy small ships/same class ships. However Strike Craft do have the benefit of being a _weapon_ and based off of something that doesn't die. Large ships are without comparison the best to take out star bases and do bombardment.

Hello, I just have a question regarding the usability of strike crafts. I was using them in the late game against the crisis (x10) pretty successfully. Idea was that my psyonic shields get pushed to the max by teching +5% repeatable shield technology. Since my physics research was blocked I only had engineering for weapons and since I knew that kinetic sucks compared to energy I got my strikecrafts to the max. In the end my 250 size fleets of 1 titan and the rest battleships had a fleetpower of 800k and with 10 of them I was rolling over the crisis. Now I´m in the middle of my x25 crisis strenghts play through and a bit confused if my approach is optimal. I play at 0.75 tech cost so the repeatable techs can easily reach 50+ for shields and 30+ for the 2 weapon techs. The repeatable tech for strikecrafts gives a 10% bonus instead of the 5% bonus of weapon tech. I also thought that might add up. Anyone has an opinion on this setup?

It's nice to fit L Could Lightning on Battleships with Focused Arc Emmiters.

Thanks for the video, I have a question. If you have access to the enigmatic fortress goodies. Woudl you replace the afterburners with the encoder for even higher evasion on bigger ships? I see you tend to add just afterburners for more speed. Woudl you still prefer more speed, if you had access to the enigmatic encoder?)higher evasion?) I would have suggested the following: 1-Breaking up the video into smaller digestible chunks. A-Non weapon slots. B-Weaponry C-part 3 of a video in regards to taking A and B into consideration when building a ship. Now for the q

I’ve been building different ships for different things mostly based on the combat roles.

At the start I take two types of corvette 50/50 split one with flak and the other missiles upgrade to torpedoes as I feel strike craft is the main problem instead of missiles they have evasion mainly for that. Destroyers are primarily for pd Defense and intercept enemy corvettes for the backline. Cruiser is the primary missile ship with medium weapons, while battleships being artillery with one slot for strike craft. Each fleet gets ship ratio roughly based on the command point but more destroyers less corvettes (pure torpedo or swarm). With couple(based on how many main fleets I got) pure flak corvettes rapid deployment fleets that don’t reach command cap to deal with piracy and train up new admirals. So far it works great for me both on gameplay and role play.

Great video m8! Thank you for the tips! Some parts were a bit difficult to follow, but I know you try to keep things brief. Also, just in case 5,000 people haven't already informed you, lol, your twitch link still has "anon" spelled as "annon". Cheers!

Question: do you have any insight into how the ships “decide” what to attack? I remember a few patches ago there was a problem with mixing different weapons. I think the example was battleship with a mix of kinetic and energy weapons; since they had different ranges, the targeting script would default to the longer range, which was usually kinetic back then. After the first volley, the enemy shields would be basically stripped, but rather than focusing down the same target it would re-target to the next ship with the highest amount of shields (since it was favoring the kinetic weapons). This essentially wasted the potential of the energy weapons, and with high enough engagement numbers, gave the shields enough time to recharge. Ever since then, I’ve split my ships to only have one weapon type, and build equal numbers for both. I.E. a corvette swarm with 50 ships would have 25 kinetic-only ships and 25 energy-only ships. I feel like this does more concentrated damage. Unfortunately, my computer has been out of action for almost a month (power issues), so I have no way of actually testing if this assumption still holds true. I would love to hear your input.

3:00 nice

There is also another cool design that I call the Void Emmiter. Battleships with only arc emmiters and void lightinings and a spice of rapid deployment war doctrine. Before 2.6 it was already very efficient, but then they added the juggernaut, that can give you more weapons range on these ships. Combining a titan to give more accuracy to the battleships and these things wreck fleets before they can even get close to you. The thing here is giving these weapons as much range and hit chance as possible.

strike craft actually have a very important use, which is dealing with torpedo corvettes that shred battleships while being nearly impossible to hit, due to their high evasion. due to the perfect tracking of strike craft, they effectively ignore evasion, meaning the low health of the corvettes is easily exploited by strike craft, while the torpedo corvettes can shred battleships lacking PD or flak. and cruisers can still carry torpedoes like corvettes, and since they disengage easily, that high alpha strike from the torpedoes will shred an undefended fleet. on top of that, a lot of enemies actually only use shields, making artillery, autocannons, and kinetic batteries really good compared to launchers. things like void clouds, extradimensional invaders, and avatars only use shields and hull.

Hull modules are good on 90% evasion corvettes, it gives them enough health to actually be able to disengage frequently when they do get hit. Their possible shield and armor pools are so low that they wont let it take any more hits than a full hull setup, and without hull modules your corvette is likely to be killed outright before dropping under 50% hull once shields/armor are down.

I always in the late game once i get battle ships, i convert all my cruisers to either misslers or carriers and have majority battleships with Neron missles and arc emmitters, You can earrase fleets in the first volley with arc emitters

hey quick question is thre a video on countering weapons like missiles and certain designs and stuff like that

One design you might want to add to your battleships repertoire is the good old 4-2-2 (tacyon + 2 kinetic artillery + 2 neutron launchers). I dismissed it myself initially after the latest weapons overhaul (2.0 was it?), as I figured that the giga cannon would be better due to the anti-shield weapon having the longest range, and thus striking first. However, I saw some fleet battle simulation discussions on the paradox forums, and they had tested and found out that the 4-2-2, on average, beat the giga cannon variant by a small margin. I have been using this design myself recently, and can say with confidence that it is just as powerful as the other variants, if not more powerful. I personally like it, because it allows me to get endgame weapons fast through physics research, which tends to be easier to get than engineering. Because of this, by the time giga cannons pop up on my reasearch options, I already have maxed out fleets up and running. Of course, I need to still find kinetic artillery, but that one tends to come by faster than the giga cannon. As for why exactly it is more powerful than the other designs, my best guess is the tachyon simply having a bit better %-bonuses or stats than the giga cannon.

Hi Stefan, with the upcoming update to consoles, what about the T34 space (FAE+CL) in 2.6.3 and would you advise to go armor heavy or shields.

Hi Steffan, Whats you take on fleet composition? Is it better to go all one type or mix and match as needed? Can you clarify on force disparity? wiki says its based on fleet vs fleet. You say its fleet vs naval cap.Also how is force disparity applied; is it based on the engagement encounter or on per fleet basis?

auto-cannon torpvettes are actually really useful because the torps destroy the armor while the auto cannon rips through the shields and when they are done they go straight for the hull since the armor is gone

Hey Stefan, I've noticed that you're running lasers a lot. Is it much better than kinetic type guns/cannons now? I like to run kinetic heavy due to dps (pretty much since the beginning) with some laser as extra help for armor. But I'm not aware if they've made changes to the weapons' damages

ameoba flagella seem useful simply because you can get them so early. just kill a few space amoebas and you should have access to it, and (in my experience) many decades before higher level strike craft. i never changed them out for L3 strike craft (since i'm a pleb and just looked at dps), so i guess i will adjust that in the future

16:21 start of builds

I've been thumbnail baited! Not that I'm complaining since I actually need this guide.

Do you ever/when do you use say energy siphon weaponry? If so how many slots? I was messing around with a destroyer that has 2 energy siphon and picket and the cruisers run plasma for increased armor and hull.

Idk if anyone pointed out but at 9:00 onwards you talk about strike craft being but good and bad against cruisers so i'm assuming when you're talking being good against smaller ships i believe you ment to say corvettes?

The flagella are good if you get them in the front because they deal more damage then tier 2s I think I usually have one or two line cruisers or even pickets with those in my first war

Aside from "counter your enemy" is there any guidance to be had on shield versus armor? I tend toward 2/3 or more shield modules unless I got lucky on my armor tech and it is somehow ahead. My reasoning is then I am not falling back to regen frequently unless I encounter an enemy that bypasses shield.

Hi, thanks for the vid. You've covered arc emitters and giga cannons extensively, I wanted to ask about Tachyon lance, is it that much worse? I understand it is much weaker against Unbidden, for example, but in general?

Hello, great video -- thanks! I'm hoping you know, you probably do. To keep it simple, what if I buy, for example, 1 Corvette, 1 Destroyer, 1 Cruiser and 1 Battleship and that comprises a fleet of mine. Is it better, as I go along and research Particle Cannons and so on and "Update" my ships often or is it better to design them often as I research upgrades? Is it the same?