Stellaris Weapons & Defences Tier List

the ship is compromised too close to the singularity to survive without assistance which we are willing to provide i would rather die in agony than accept assistance from you you got it arm phasers fire everything we've got yes sir stellaris has a phenomenal host of weapon and defense ship components at your disposal that you can pick and choose between when designing your ships in this video i'm going to break down which components i think are really good which are all right and which are downright terrible i think it's also quite important to mention the vast vast majority of the placings here are not specifically down to my personal opinion they're actually based on the testing the ship component testing i did last year in 2021 if you'd like to check out those videos there are a long and thorough series i'll put a link down in the description so without any further ado let's dive in and have a look at the tier list the way that i've split up this tier list we are going to have weapon components on the left hand side and utility and core components on the right hand side that means on the right we're going to have both your auxiliary module components your core components that there are choices on such as your combat computers and of course your defensive modules i'd also like to point out that each of these different weapons or most of them have different technology levels with different power levels that means that whilst i may put for instance kinetic weapons on a different tier 2a laser weapon possibly you'll have to wait and find out but if i were to do that if you had tier 5 kinetics and tier 1 lasers of course the tier 5 kinetics would be better no matter where they were on the list in relation to the tier 1 weapons so that is something to bear in mind here we're just trying to think about this on an equivalent scale we're going to start right at the bottom with the f tier for our weapons now most of these modules in the ftf weapons i don't think you should ever put them on your ship there are a couple of exceptions which i'll discuss when we get to them but basically i don't think you're ever going to benefit from having these over any other component type in your weapon modules first up in the ft we have disruptors now i know a lot of people really like this weapon and that is fine you know it is quite a nice thematic weapon to be able to bypass someone's shields and armor completely and directly strike against the hull but why is this weapon so terrible well basically it only comes in small and medium size that means you're never going to have it as a large size weapon which means you'll never be able to have it with long range first off that's a massive disadvantage in the mid to late game where large weapons dominate and pretty much reign supreme the second issue here is the average damage output or just the damage output in general the damage output of this weapon compared to something like a regular laser or kinetic weapon of the same technology level is about 40 percent in the early game and the mid game your hull points will not represent 40 percent of the ship's health they'll represent something in the region of 50 60 70 percent that means that overall the kinetic and laser weapons are going to be killing the enemy ships faster and then later on in the game when you get into the range of some of the big bads with the very very powerful artillery type weapons they are going to have masses orders of magnitude more damage output potential than these disruptors but i'm not done slandering these disruptors yes they do have 100 accuracy which on the surface would seem like a very positive thing however you're going to be able to use things like additional hit chance modules to boost the accuracy of weapons with lower accuracy at say the 85 90 range all the way up to 800 and that will be very very easy so yes fine having 100 accuracy is great but when you have to combine this type of weapon with other weapon types which you'll then want to boost their accuracy that additional accuracy is not going to help the disruptors and therefore you're really missing out so there's an opportunity cost here as well point defense weapons are a bit of a joke in this game here we have flat guns these are meant to be anti-fighter weapons and they are meant to help the problem is by replacing one of your small slots with one of these picket slots or whatever other slot it is you're replacing you'll be able to defeat some of the enemy fighters yes but you won't defeat all of them the efficiency of these flat guns is not high enough to justify the opportunity cost of placing them on your ship over an offensive weapon it is consistently better to destroy your opponent ship and therefore knock out their fighters than it is to attempt to stop just their fighters dealing damage to your ship unfortunately i really don't think there is ever a time to use flak batteries and flat guns and that's because of the next weapon we're going to look at point defense has many of the same issues as the flack point defense will not destroy all incoming missiles though it will usually do a good job and take down quite a lot of them there are only really two cases where i would recommend you put down these point defense slots if you have something like a carrier it can be useful to put in these anti-missile defenses if you know you're going to come up against corvette swarms full of missiles the other reason is if you're in the early game and you have some corvettes and you want to defeat enemy star bases that have not been upgraded that's the lowest level of star base you can put one of these on your corvettes and send that corvette out and it will be able to stop incoming missiles and thus protect your fleet from taking any damage from completely unupgraded star bases while you're in an offensive wall so yes you can use it but really it is not very effective cloud lightning has all of the issues that disrupters had it is basically an l slot disruptor weapon again the average damage or the damage output is very very low compared to equivalent weapons and really you don't want to run this there is a case to justify this weapon and that is in the early to mid game you can use cloud lightning weapons effectively if you want to take on a fallen empire because they'll have such massive bonuses to armor and shields that you can defeat fallen empire ships you can kind of meme them actually by taking them on with cloud lightning you can defeat a small fleet and therefore steal some of their technology quite early in the game so that is pretty much the only case i would ever recommend using cloud lightning because otherwise they are going to cause your ships to die null void beam is quite an interesting weapon you can get your hands on this if you find the null void as a possible outcome of the interdimensional portal event chain on one of your planets this weapon does massive damage against shield 400 percent in fact but only 25 damage against armor and 25 percent against hull it does have very long range which is very helpful that means it's going to shoot and target enemy shields first but if you completely kick your ships out with this weapon you're gonna find they are unable to take down enemy ships because they don't do really any damage against armor or hull so you'll only want a few of these on your ships and then if you only have a few they're really not doing enough damage against shields to justify their inclusion you won't have taken out all of the enemy shields before you actually get into a closer engagement range and your other weapons start firing so basically i don't think you can ever really use the null void beam effectively when there are other better options and combos available unlike with the ftf4 weapons the ftf4r defense and utility slots are a little different i can see cases for when you would use all of the components here though they are the worst components when compared to the rest of the components the orbital trash compactor lets your ships deal an additional plus 25 orbital bombardment damage why is this rubbish well basically you're only ever really going to need this once you've already knocked out the enemy fleets and therefore if you put this on your ships you're reducing their potential combat effectiveness and thus reducing the chance you'll actually get into a situation where you're bombarding planets now maybe you build ships with only these orbital bombardment damage orbital trash dispersers on them just for bombarding and then in my opinion you are wasting the potential naval capacity on these dummy ships that you could otherwise put onto combat effective ships and if the planet is so massively defended it's probably better to just crack it anyway and if you're enjoying this video please target the like button you may fire when ready reactor boosters are quite an interesting component for a few alloys you can increase the power generation on your ships now why do i think this isn't very useful well generally speaking i am very much subscribed to the philosophy that if you are over your power generation it is better to not include one of these boosters and thus get more and more expensive components on your ship just to squeeze out that little bit of extra shields than it is to stay below your power capacity and instead produce more ships at a cheaper cost this is of course as long as you are not compromising the weapons on your ship therefore the damage output it is usually better to have more ships with the same damage output and lower defenses than it is to simply have fewer ships with slightly better defenses the carrier combat computer increases your engagement range this can be useful for carriers as it means their fighters will deploy earlier but why is this rubbish well basically as long as you have this on just one ship in your fleet the fleet will engage earlier and all of the carriers will spew forth and therefore you don't need to have this component across all your ships yes it can be useful but i would recommend just having a single carrier combat computer and then using some different more effective combat computers on the rest of your ship because all the rest of the combat computers will actually improve your ship's weapon output all of these weapons in the seat here have their uses though over time as the game goes on they're going to be phased out by other better weapon choices and that's why they're down here in the sea tier having said that there aren't any weapons that can do what swarmer missiles can do so you're not really going to be replacing this with a better weapon swarmer missiles have the lowest damage output from any of the missiles in the game however they have a very high rate of fire and the point of them is to overwhelm enemy point defenses and enemy fighters that may be trying to shoot down your missiles the issue is it doesn't really work if you swap out all of your missiles for these swarmer missiles you may hit the target with your missiles even if they're running heavy point defense but you're probably better off firing at them with weapons that cannot be shot down i'm looking at regular weapons here artillery weapons anything that won't be affected by enemy point defense and fighters and maybe you've blended some of these swarmer missiles in with torpedoes or regular missiles well the issue there is that you are again reducing your overall damage output in order to counter point defenses that may or may not even exist regular kinetic weapons that's mass drivers do an extra 50 percent damage against shields 50 percent less damage against armor and a normal amount of hull damage they also have a higher range but lower accuracy than their equivalent energy based laser weapons they sit down here in the seat here as i mentioned because generally speaking you're probably going to be replacing this weapon class with other better weapons in your slots as the game gets through to the mid and late game laser weapons are pretty much identical to kinetic weapons except they do 50 less damage against shields and 50 more damage against armor they also have a base accuracy of 90 percent and a slightly reduced range when compared to kinetic weapons mining lasers are a very interesting and unique weapon you can get if you salvage the technology from the debris of destroyed ancient mining drones they'll do less damage against shields slightly increased damage against armor and massive extra damage against hull these weapons are very very good if you want to try to defeat some leviathans like the ether drake possibly in the very early game you can get these quite early and that massive extra damage versus hull and extra damage versus armor will make them very effective against targets with no shields but as the game goes on like the rest of the weapons you're going to want to replace these weapon components with others in your fleet the energy siphon is to all intents and purposes a slightly worse version of an auto cannon yes you can get it from society technology which means that you don't need to waste engineering technology on it which i suppose is a good thing but other than that you're almost certainly going to want to use an auto cannon if you can get your hands on it it does extra damage against shields reduced damage against armor but that is a fast vastly reduced damage down to only 25 percent and normal damage against hull but as you can see that basically makes auto cannons a better pick here there is a slight window in the very early game where an energy siphon will be better because you simply haven't researched autocannons yet but that window is very very narrow amoeba flagella are very similar to the last two weapons we looked at you can get your hands on these if you can either breed space amoeba or harvest the corpses of dead amoeba that you've slain this does quite high average damage at 40 making them quite a nice weapon however the real issue here is the fact that they have very low accuracy and tracking compared to regular strike craft they have only 70 percent accuracy and 50 tracking meaning they are not that effective at taking on corvettes compared to your normal strike craft that you'll get through the normal research channels i think it's very possible you might strongly disagree with the placement of some of the modules here in the c tier four defenses and utility slots if you do please let me know down in the comments below first up we have armor now i have differentiated between dragon scale armor and the regular armor chains you'll get through technology but to all intents and purposes they are identical the scaling just continues from level 5 neutronian armor up to level 6 dragon scale armor you are paying a hefty premium at alloys for armor points on your ships and the issue here basically is the cost of these extra armor points it is astronomical armor cost twice as much as shields and you can only repair it if you're at a star base or you spend extra resources on having components to repair your armor while away from home and for that reason basically it is sometimes even better to forego the armor have a cheaper ship and therefore a higher maximum damage output because you have more ships built of course there are situations where armor is very very effective in the late game if you stack enough repeatables here the armor is definitely going to become worth it at some point don't get me wrong but that level is a long way off afterburners increase your sublight speed and evasion they only give a percentage increase to invasion so that means if you put this on something like a battleship you'll get an extra 10 of the base evasion which is basically no evasion added if you put them on something like a corvette or destroyer you can end up pushing the evasion of that corvette or destroyer all the way up to the max 90 of asian but i just want to reiterate this doesn't add five percent evasion it increases the evasion by five percent of your base evasion value or ten percent in the case of advanced afterburners and for that reason i really do think it deserves its place down here in the c tier line combat computers increase your fire rate which is very nice and they also increase your ship accuracy the problem is the accuracy of your weapons is capped out at a hundred percent so if you add this component to a ship which has weapons with already 100 accuracy you're missing out on a large part of the bonus this is most effective for kinetic type weapons as they tend to have lower accuracy but even then the highest level of this component will add plus 20 accuracy which for something like kinetic artillery is great but when we look at if you've got a mixed ship and we have let's say kinetic artillery and neutron launchers something at 90 percent accuracy you're wasting the additional accuracy and therefore you probably want to choose a different bonus and a different combat computer type and if you're enjoying this video and the other videos on this channel and you'd like to support this channel you can do so by becoming a channel member and joining by supporting this channel on patreon and becoming a patron or alternatively using the affiliate link in the description and purchasing something from the humble bundle store welcome to the b tier in this tier we've got weapons that are definitely very very useful although to get the best out of your fleets you might not end up using all of them though some of them i believe you'll still have them in your ships right up until the end of the game auto cannons can only be equipped on small slots which is their major disadvantage but once we get past that you'll see they're very very cost effective weapons they deal 150 percent extra damage to shields very low damage to armor at only 25 percent and 125 damage against hull they have a very high damage and average damage outputs very high range and tracking for these type of weapons if you're dealing with corvettes in the early to mid game you almost certainly want to put something like an auto cannon on your corvettes or destroyers though having such a high rate of fire if you're shooting at ships with a high disengagement chance you are going to find it very difficult to actually destroy the enemy ship you're fighting against because they'll have so many chances to disengage plasma weaponry will tend to dominate the battlefield once the technology is researched up until the mid to late mid game they deal a very low amount of damage against shields at only 25 but they deal phenomenal damage 200 percent damage to armor and 150 damage to hull they come in small medium and large weapon size though they don't have very large range at only 70 range at the maximum size they do have very good output in terms of damage when we combine it with that hull multiplier if you're facing ships which are heavily equipped with armor or crystal hull plating plasma weaponry is the way to go generally speaking strike craft are the most effective way to counter higher vason ships like corvettes they're slightly less effective against destroyers because destroyers have a higher disengagement chance and strike craft fire many many small damage shots which just like the auto cannon is a drawback but at the highest level they have 100 tracking meaning they will completely negate any enemy evasion and they will always have a 100 accuracy these strikecraft in my opinion will always find a place in a fleet in the late game as long as you're coming up against fleets or you're afraid of coming up against fleets which may have ships in them like corvettes or high evasion destroyers their main downside is the fact that they first have to deploy and then fly all the way across the system to begin engaging whatever target you want them to fire at that means that when compared to long-range artillery weapons the artillery will probably get one to two rounds of firing in before the strike craft get in range and are able to fire there are ways of cheesing this and getting the strike craft to deploy early though it isn't massively reliable and generally speaking artillery will prevail it's also important to note that strikecraft have the capability to shoot down enemy missiles that are incoming as well as well as enemy strikecraft strike crafts are actually the most effective point defense you will find in stellaris normal missiles are one of the three basic weapon technologies you start the game with so you might think it's a little odd that they have found their way up here to the b tier whereas the kinetic and laser weaponry was relegated down to sea tier the reason for this is that normal missiles do an extra 25 damage against hull and that means they are an active contender to put on your corvettes when you're trying to build missile corvettes in the late game to take on enemy artillery battleships you can choose between marauder missiles or devastated torpedoes and it is a fair comparison however if your opponent is not running a plethora of crystal plating on those ships you'll probably want to go for the torpedoes because the torpedoes have a higher individual rate of damage because they hit all of their damage in one go but have a longer cooldown thus with ships like battleships they are less likely to disengage in a similar way the problem that strikecraft and autocannons had perdition beams or ion cannons are the only weapons you can fit in your titanic weapon slots these are the weapons you have on your titans why are they down here in the b tier though well basically they will do a phenomenal amount of damage between 5 000 and 10 000 damage per hit but they have basically no tracking at zero percent meaning they're very very bad if they accidentally fire something like a corvette with 90 evasion they have a very large cooldown and generally speaking they will overkill whatever ship they fire at they are very good at taking on enemy star bases because starbases tend to have very high health but against regular ships they are something of an overkill weapon and therefore they're not actually that great but you really don't have a choice between this weapon and any other weapon in the titan slot unfortunately important thing to note though they are the weapon with the longest range in stellaris if you've seen some of my previous videos on ship components and ship design you might be surprised about what we have here in the b tier for our defensive and utility modules first up we have regenerative hull tissue now generally speaking i have completely trashed this component for a long long time i even went so far as to make a video about how ineffective regenerative hull tissue is to put on your ships that was before patch 3.3 i believe the devs uh they saw my video or they saw other complaints from other people about the fact that regenerative whole tissue added plus one point of hull points or one point of armor regen per day and they instead changed it to add a percentage amount of hull and armor regeneration that means that a regenerative hull tissue on your ship if you just put a single one of these modules will completely repair your ship's hull in 200 days and the armor in 100 days therefore it can be useful to put one of these uh components on your ship for if your ship is going on long campaigns into enemy territory however that being said the hull regeneration and armor regeneration does not work whilst you're in combat so from a combat perspective it's not that useful however a logistics perspective does make it very nice the enigmatic encoder is the best a-slot component that will increase your evasion it will add plus 20 evasion however just like the thrusters this is an extra 20 of whatever your base evasion value is in order to get this component you have to complete the enigmatic fortress chain successfully and there is an element of rng when you do you might not end up getting the enigmatic encoder after that event chain the shield capacitor increases your shield hurt points by 10 percent this is especially effective in the late game if you have some tier 5 or 6 shields on your ship it's also a much better module to have on bigger ships which have more shields on small ships like destroyers and corvettes you probably want to be using evasion to negate the enemy damage rather than having extra shielding the swarm combat computer adds both fire rate and evasion to your ship it is also only available to corvette ships in the early game this can be useful though i would actually generally recommend one of the other combat computers we haven't got to that one yet but basically you can get a 90 evasion without using this combat computer in the mid to late game by using other components and other technologies and really earlier on in the game you're not going to get that much benefit out of this extra evasion if you're fighting other ships which have a vagin and you'd probably want some sort of component that added tracking all right we've made it all the way up to the a tier this has been a monumentally large tier list so thank you if you're still with me if you are please let me know down in the comments below i'm curious to see how many people have actually made it this far through the video our committers are the first x-slot weapons or extra large slot weapons that we've come across they have a cooldown of around 8 days 100 accuracy and just like the rest of the bypass weapons completely ignore shields and armor however unlike the rest of the bypass weapons they're not down in the f tier they're way up here in the a tier and could possibly according to some arguments be placed in the s tier now basically why i've got them here in the eight here rather than the s here is that yes they will deal directly damage to the enemy hulls but in a straight up fight against other equivalent ships equipped with the other x-slot weapons like mega cannon and tachyon lance's you're going to find that the archimeters are less powerful on an equal footing perspective yes against fallen empires they are definitely very useful and very powerful although i wouldn't always recommend using them why is that well basically you can only have one x slot weapon on your battleships and then you'll have probably if they're an artillery battleship four other weapon slots those weapon slots are pretty much going to have to be either a kinetic based weapon like kinetic artillery or an energy based weapon like neutron launchers those other weapons are not going to complement the archimeters because they're going to have to first chew through the shields and the armor of the enemy ships before dealing damage to hull and therefore you end up with a bit of a mismatch and i believe that's why in all of the testing i've done our committers did not end up on top though of course when repeatables come into play it is very specific with regards to which repeatable you've taken over and over again if you've taken the energy weapon increased damage 10 times the archimeter is going to be much more powerful than a kinetic weapon if you've not taken any increased damage output from kinetic weapon repeatables tachyon lances are some of the coolest looking weapons in the game however the issue with these weapons is what they combine well with they do less damage against shields increased damage against armor and increase damage against hull that means to counter this weapon you need to put extra shield modules on your ship shields are some of the best modules on your ship and you're almost certainly going to want to fill out the shield slots to completion and spend all of your available power on shields before you start looking at armor or hull plating to fill up the remaining defensive slots that means that ships which are built to counter tachyon lances are the most cost-effective ship designs and that means if you compare fleets of equal economic power so if you spend an equal number of alloys on both fleets the anti-tachyon landships will be cheaper and you can build more of them than other ships which might run something like a kinetic based or anti-shield weapon again this is not my personal opinion this is the result of a lot of testing i did last year kinetic artillery is an l-slot kinetic weapon with the largest range for any l-slot kinetic weapon it has a small small cooldown of only six days deals 200 extra damage against shields reduced damage against armor and 125 damage against hull if you're looking to put kinetic weapons into your l slot this is pretty much the best kinetic weapon to choose because that additional range will be a phenomenal advantage when fighting other ships and that is before we even start looking at the massively high damage output and average damage for each shot scourge missiles can only be gained by salvaging technology from defeated prethorian scourge ships and you need society research in order to get them they are without a doubt the best missile weapons available to you in the game they completely ignore shields and deal an extra 50 percent damage against armor and hull unfortunately like all missile weapons they can be shot down by point defense or enemy fighters and that's why they are still here in the age here and haven't managed to sneak up to the s tier above they also have quite low tracking which makes them ineffective against high evasion ships torpedoes are synonymous with corvettes in the late game you can use torpedo corvettes to devastating effect against artillery battleships if they don't have any way of countering your evasion they also basically deal massive damage output in a single hit with a very long cooldown which is very useful when coming up against ships with high disengagement chance in order to get your hands on mata disintegrators you have to salvage wreckage from the extra dimensional invaders that means the unbidden these weapons do minus 50 damage against shields plus 50 percent damage against armor and a whopping plus 100 damage against hull they also have very long range just like kinetic artillery at 120 range they also have very very very low cooldown for large artillery weapons meaning their average damage is on par with kinetic artillery or the other weapon in this category which is neutral launchers however when we compare them to something like the neutron launcher their reduced range will make them suffer and that means you're probably not going to want to run them as your anti-armor or anti-hull choice because there's simply a slightly better option available just like scourge missiles swarm strikers can be taken from the prethorian scourge these weapons are basically the best strike craft you have in the game they ignore shields completely ignore 66 of enemy armor and deal 100 damage against hull unlike the amoeba they have 100 accuracy and 80 tracking with an average damage of 50 that's the highest average damage for any carrier type weapon so if you can get your hands on these weapons put them in your h slots now we get to the atf4 utility and defensive modules if you've seen other videos of mine you may not be surprised at what we find here it would be very reasonable to compare crystal infused plating to armor crystal infused plating is equivalent in the hull points gained plus 110 in the small slot 275 in the medium and 660 in the large to tier 4 armor however you can get this for a fraction of the cost instead of costing alloys crystal plating costs crystals instead but if we convert those crystal costs to an equivalent amount of alloys it is very interesting they basically cost between five and ten percent the cost of your armor but they add very similar number of hull points and generally speaking hull points are better to have than armor points there are fewer weapons that deal additional damage to hull and by increasing your hull points you are very effectively countering bypass weapons like our committers the economic argument here basically means that for an equivalent amount of cost or equivalent number of alloys you can get more ships if you put crystal infused plating on them than if you put armor that is about a 10 to 15 percent increase as well which means that your crystal infused plating ships will outperform an armor-plated navy because at the end of the day stellaris is a game of economics now you might be arguing that wait hold on up a minute i'm already at my naval capacity and therefore it's probably better if i put armor on instead no absolutely not instead you should just go over your naval capacity at high levels of naval cap going over 10 20 30 is really not that bad on top of that it's probably a very good idea to work at increasing your naval capacity too in the mid to late game it is very good to have naval capacity in the one to two to three thousand range mark and that's the kind of navel cap you want to be working with here as some of the best weapons in the game deal less damage to shields shields are very very useful and important to put on your ships that's why they're up here in the a tier on top of that shields will regenerate hit points when you're out of combat and that is very very useful you almost always want to maximize the number of shields you can have on your ship after you've spent your energy on weapons spend the rest of your energy on shields just like the dragon scale armor we've also got dark matter deflectors here as well because they're basically a tier 6 shield they add more hit points than a tier 5 a hypershield whilst costing an increased number of alloys nanite repair systems are a basically better version of the regenerative hull tissue they have two percent daily armor regen and plus one and a half percent daily hull regen the only issue with them is is that you need nanites and it can be quite hard to get nanites especially if you haven't managed to open up the l cluster so ignoring the economic difficulty of getting those nanites they definitely deserve their place here in the a here and lastly we've got the picket combat computers these combat computers are available to corvettes destroyers and cruisers and they are phenomenal for adding additional tracking to your ships like most combat computers they add fire rate and the secondary bonus here is additional tracking that's why they're up here because basically if you're having to fight anything with high evasion you will need extra tracking and you'll want this combat computer on your ship they are particularly effective in the early to mid game when there are lots of corvettes and destroyers flying around welcome to the final tier this is the creme de la creme of weapons in stellaris you might have already guessed what's up here if you've seen any of my other videos on ship design you have almost certainly guessed so with no further ado let's find out what we have here mega cannons are the anti-shield x-slot weapons in this game they have plus 50 damage against shields minus 25 damage against armor and plus 25 damage against hull by themselves they do seem somewhat weaker than the tachyon lance's but then we have to consider what they can be paired with and also what the economic cost is of trying to equip yourself to defend against this type of ship armor is twice as expensive as shields so if you equip your ships with extra armor to counter mega cannons you'll end up having much more expensive ships and overall it will be bad for your enemies navy on top of that we can only have one xlot weapon on our artillery battleships and the rest must be something like an l slot so what do we put in that l slot to complement this fantastic x-lot weapon and that is the best l-slot weapon in the game neutron launchers neutron launchers have the largest range of any l-slot weapon at a hundred and thirty meaning you will get a salvo with neutron launchers before any other type of l-slot weapon gets to fire yes they have reduced damage against shields but they have massively increased damage against hull at plus 75 damage against hull and plus 50 damage against armor when we combine these with the giga cannon x-slot weapons the giga cannons are going to shoot and take down a large amount of enemy shields then the neutron launchers will be firing at mostly unshielded armor and hull ships having said that the way that target priority works neutron launchers are going to shoot at the unshielded ships before they shoot at the shielded ships and thus you will find they take out ships first before moving on to another target when we compare that to something like kinetic artillery kinetic artillery will generally fire at shielded ships first because they deal additional damage against shielded ships and not completely wipe out enemy ships before moving on to another target and that can be a problem basically if you combine neutron launchers and giga cannons on your ships you can't go far wrong in the s tier 4 defenses and utility modules we have quite a few interesting and unique choices first up is crystal forged plating now this is actually as from a cost perspective proportionally much better than crystal infused plating it costs more but you get even more bang for your buck when you put this on your ship it's harder to get you have to destroy the massive crystal fortress in a specific system to get at it but if you can get this component and put it on your ships i definitely recommend it the reason that we have psionic shields here in the s tier is that they are a level above all other shield technologies they are even better than dark matter deflectors and they offer the most shield hit points for any shield system in the game that's why they're up here at the top in the s tier you probably want to if you can put psionic shields and crystal forge plating on your ships auxiliary fire controls add plus five chance to hit now basically that is actually plus five to your accuracy and cannot go over 100 i've tested it believe me but what that means is you can increase the damage output of your weapons that start with accuracy below 100 and for that reason this module is almost essential to put on your ships if you can two of these on a battleship will increase the accuracy of your neutron launchers up to 100 percent if you can defeat the enigmatic fortress and roll correctly to get your hands on the enigmatic decoder you've basically got an even better version of auxiliary fire control yes it does cost double but you also get in addition to that plus five chance to hit plus five extra tracking that extra tracking means your artillery battleships might actually be able to effectively deal with enemy corvettes if they've got a tracking level high enough and the last component in this tier list is the artillery combat computer i believe this is the best combat computer in the game and i'll explain why it is possible to increase the accuracy of your weapons to 100 without using the line combat computer battleships cannot have anything other than line combat computers artillery combat computers and carrier combat computers because of the fact you can increase your accuracy using other methods than the line combat computer the artillery combat computer becomes better as it adds plus 10 weapons range or plus weapons range in addition to adding additional fire rate that means that your weapons will shoot before your enemies weapons if they don't have this same combat computer and you will eliminate enemy ships before they get the chance to fire at you and eliminate some of your ships alpha strikes in the game of stellaris are devastating and highly effective and that's why artillery combat computer is in my opinion the best combat computer in the game but in order to build these ships we're going to need lots and lots of alloys if you'd like to know how to maximize your alloy output as early as possible by tech b-lining for the alloy technologies click the video on screen now

Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 428,061

Keywords: Stellaris, stellaris gameplay, montu plays, montu plays stellaris, stellaris tier list, stellaris tier list 2022, stellaris weapons tier list, stellaris weapons guide, stellaris ship tier list, stellaris guide, stellaris 3.3, stellaris 2022, stellaris 2022 meta, stellaris combat, stellaris fleet design, stellaris fleet design guide, stellaris ship design, stellaris ship design guide

Id: 1_xpJKon-sY

Length: 41min 53sec (2513 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022