Stellaris Defence Platforms

now witness the fire power of this fully armed and operational battle station [Music] defensive platforms can be built around your star bases to bolster the static defenses of your empire but how good are they are they actually worthwhile and should we be building them in this video i am going to conclusively answer that question once and for all i have done a whole suite of tests on every ship type and i'm going to be presenting you the most pertinent and most important results that will finally provide the answer of our defense platforms actually worth it we're going to start in the early game looking at corvettes and then destroyers i haven't included my results for cruisers as there was nothing special to report there that fell in line with the results for battleships and destroyers as well somewhere in between those we will finally look at late game battleships and whether or not we can actually use defensive platforms to stand up to their impressive might and last but not least what about max evasion destroyers which should be able to evade lots of the incoming fire from a defensive platform are they any good at defeating those destroyers all of those questions and more will be answered in this video so stick around and find out but without any further ado let's dive in and find out what's going on with defensive platforms what is the situation right at the start of the game so at the start of the game you'll have corvettes and you can also build defensive platforms if somebody comes to attack you right off the bat before you have much technology if they come to rush you down that is either an ai or another player basically any empire coming to destroy you at the start of the game we need to know which is better to build more corvettes like this or if instead you should first put those resources towards defensive platforms for our defensive platforms the main two designs i'm going to be showing off here now don't worry i have tested pretty much the full spectrum of designs that being large medium and small slot designs along with the missile station section for our small slot defense platform we're going to go in with a mix of kinetic and energy weapons that should damage both shields and armor pretty evenly and then leave the hulls open to cut up the same is true of our large slot defense platform coming up against these we're going to be having our gun boat type corvettes that's all small slot weapons and of course a predominant threat with the corvette which is a missile boat corvette when building up these defenses we're going to be paying special attention to the cost of our defensive platforms and the ships that come up against them because in all of these tests we're going to look at economically balanced fleets and that should tell us what's going to get us the best bang for our buck and what you should spend your money on first our starbase is going to have the gun battery modules available at the start of the game and a disruption field generator to weaken the enemy shields now you may be surprised by this but basically the defensive platforms are going to win every time against this 24 strong corvette fleet what you're seeing here is just with the small weapon slots and they are actually very good against corvettes they have a high level of tracking which negates the basic corvette defense called evasion and if you're enjoying this video please defend that like button you might expect the large slot defensive platforms to do pretty poorly they have very low tracking and therefore shouldn't hit very often however they tend to engage earlier than the regular small slots because they do have longer range and just like the small slot defensive platforms they also carry the day in fact casualties for the corvettes are pretty equivalent if you take the small platform or the large platform and that means there really is no situation in which you should build a defense platform with these small weapon slots the large weapons will take longer to defeat the corvettes but overall they're going to be doing just as much damage if not more damage and actually you're going to cause a pretty equivalent number of casualties so in the early game it is best to spend your alloys if you're caught in a war on building defense platforms and then once you've filled up a starbase with defense platforms then start building some corvettes some other fleets to additionally support and defend that point this is very much dependent however on if you can make sure the enemy is going to engage your star base let's say in this case we're being attacked from the northwest over here this lishval system would be an excellent strategic position to defend from however in a situation where we couldn't guarantee the site of the engagement then it becomes more of a tricky issue whether or not you want to build a mobile fleet or build up defensive platforms how about when we get a little later in the game here we have some destroyers that i've set up ready for roughly uh about 30 years 20 to 30 years into the game this could be a reasonable design we are going to be going with a large weapon and a medium weapon along with the artillery computer this is going to be the best design you're going to find when coming up against star bases trust me i have tested the others but i am only going to show off this design here this will be fighting against a defensive platform with only large weapon slots i am throwing on the auxiliary fire control computers that will increase our accuracy and of course the combat computer is going to help with some extra tracking and fire rate too interestingly again just like with the corvettes when coming up against an equally balanced uh fleet on both sides equally balanced by economic weight the defensive platforms win however you are going to be taking some losses this time as a defensive platformed army you're not just going to wipe the floor with the destroyers and take absolutely no losses and if we upgrade to a star fortress which will come with an increased number of defensive platforms let's adjust accordingly we'll then get to fly in with an even larger destroyer fleet but the story will be exactly the same yet again the defensive platforms are going to take more losses than they did previously absolutely but you are still going to defeat destroyers of equivalent economic might but what do you think about defensive platforms do you ever use them in your games let me know down in the comments below so it is clear that building defensive platforms is better in the early and mid game but how about later on in the late game when we have such terrifying things as artillery battleships and of course neutral launchers here we're going to be playing with and looking at pretty much the king of defensive platforms that is the neutron launcher defensive platform now i am going to be putting regenerative hull tissues on these platforms or alternatively you could also put shield capacitors to boost your shield instead of your armor and hull points as the regen here will work during combat and effectively boost your total hull or armor you don't want to run something like an auxiliary fire control because the sapient combat computers which you should all be able to get of every empire type will give you plus 10 chance to hit when combined with the base accuracy of 90 for a neutral launcher will put you up to 100 so in the late game auxiliary fire controls are pretty much useless on defensive platforms we will also be looking at what carrier defensive platforms can do that is platforms with advanced strikecraft or hangers because this is something that conventional wisdom i believe that is out there and says that this is pretty much the best type of defensive platform so we'll look at how this performs as well facing off against these we have our traditional artillery battleships giga cannon x-slots along with neutral launchers as well and of course auxiliary fire controls to boost our accuracy as high as possible i'm also going to assume that you have completely finished the unyielding tradition this is going to give us some great effects for our stations and defensive platforms as you can see defensive zeal is going to give us a third extra hull points and damage fortress doctrine will reduce the cost of upgrading our star bases and the final finisher effect here will increase our defensive platform cap by 50 on top of that i'm also going to be taking the ascension perk eternal vigilance to increase our star based damage our star base hull points our defense platform damage and our defense platform cap by plus 5. this plus 5 will stack with the 50 from unyielding and in effect be plus 7.5 don't forget to also take supremacy as the master shipwrights will reduce the ship build cost or the build cost of your defensive platforms by 10 altogether this is going to let me put out 51 defense platforms in total and these are all the neutron launcher platforms with our regenerative hull tissue how do these do against the battleships well the battleships flying and engage and they do do some damage however the neutron launchers are quickly and effectively able to dispatch a battleship fleet of equal cost to the defensive platforms and the station itself you are going to receive some losses with your defensive platforms but overall you should win every engagement and that then does mean if you build these neutron launcher platforms they're better than artillery battleships from a cost perspective and therefore you should put them down first before using the rest of your alloys and resources to build other mobile battleships to reinforce this defensive position how about if we look at the hangar defensive platforms instead this actually gives our defensive position a higher military power which in theory should mean they should do even better against these artillery battleships and as you could see here from this engagement the carriers do launch however those artillery battleships are firing further they are firing faster and they are firing before the fighters even get into range and that's why you will lose every single one of your carrier platforms your fighter bay platforms if you try to use them to defend against battleships like this in the late game they are simply not up to the cut they don't work you're only going to lose around uh five to 15 of your battleships whereas conversely you're going to lose every single defensive platform and your station if you try to set it up this way there is one final type of platform we have not looked at and have not talked about and that is the ion cannon platform this is equipped with a very powerful ion cannon a titan weapon with massive range however it does have a very long cooldown which means it's not going to fire very many shots it is also relatively cheaper than your other defensive platforms each of these ion cannon platforms takes up eight defense platform slots so if you were to fill those eight slots with neutron launchers that would cost you around 4 000 alloys whereas one of these ion cannons is only around 1800 that does mean that if you fill up your starbase with these ion cannon platforms you won't get as many of them as if you were to build just neutron launchers in terms of the spending you're going to need but let's see how they're doing you're going to get the first shots off with your titan lances they have massive range and they will be able to engage uh first however whilst you will win the combat most of the time the losses you're going to suffer will be absolutely astronomical and due to the rng nature of these weapons you could find yourself in a situation where some of your titan lenses actually miss and then you lose the combat you're going to win the battle around 75 percent of the time although in a lot of cases every single defensive platform will be lost leaving you with just a naked star base and nothing less this does mean that iron cannons are definitely a less effective ship type to take and they are less effective than neutron launchers and take up too many slots on your starbase but what if we were to take a mixed position where we for instance took one of our iron cannons with a very large range and therefore a very large engagement range and filled up our defensive platforms with carriers otherwise that should mean our carriers are able to engage early that should mean our carriers are able to launch early and begin engaging the artillery battleships before they actually get a chance to fire as you can see the fighters will launch early the titan lance will fire and then they will start engaging the artillery battleships before the artillery battleships get a chance to start shooting this will mean that they do actually win the day and defeat the incoming artillery battleships they however do take reasonable losses and because of the low damage done by these weapons you actually find that there are a large number of artillery battleships that are able to retreat and this does mean that we probably don't want to be using this weapon we instead want to be using something like a neutron launcher and in fact if we replace them with a neutron launcher we see that we get a similar number of losses in terms of defensive platforms however we will completely eviscerate the enemy battleship fleet destroying almost every single battleship in the fleet as very few will be able to retreat from the neutron launchers but what about if in the late game we come to fight with a max evasion destroyer yes a ship with very high evasion that should present a problem for our low tracking neutron launchers what will that do how about versus our late game psionic destroyers they're going to have a very high evasion these have 80 with my psychic admiral along with the gale speed plus all of the other things you come to know and love they will be facing off against the bad boys the neutron launcher king class defense platforms what you are going to see though is that these uh these destroyers don't actually cut the mustard you're going to be getting massive losses in the destroyer fleet from these neutral launcher defensive platforms which just have absolutely phenomenal tracking due to their combat computers it is not a fair fight at all the destroyers here these evasion destroyers are completely eviscerated all of this means that generally speaking you want to use the large slot weapons on your defensive platforms they are the most economical and on top of that it is always better to build defensive platforms than any other ship type from an economic perspective once you've filled up those slots do change over and start building regular fleets use them to reinforce your defensive positions but overall i can say without any doubt that defensive platforms are some of the defensive platforms for the cost they are are the best ship in the game defensive platforms are only useful when we're trying to defend what if we however start with a doomsday start meaning our homeworld is going to explode in the first 30 to 40 years what should we be doing then if you'd like to know how a doomsday start can end up being a meta build click the video on screen now

Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 199,783

Keywords: Stellaris, stellaris gameplay, montu plays, montu plays stellaris, stellaris defense platform design, stellaris defence platform build, stellaris defense platform, stellaris defence platform design, stellaris defense platform build 2022, montu plays defense platform, montu plays defense, montu plays design, montu plays ship design, stellaris ship design, stellaris ship design montu

Id: Sh5iIAdatpA

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 16 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/rylasasin]

A little TL;DW:

• Defense Platforms good, actually.
• Always use L+L. No, the tracking doesn't matter that much. You can throw in aux computers early game, or use sapient combat computer late game to make up the tracking difference.
• Take Unyielding.
• Ion Cannons should not be used by themselves. Use 1 or 2 and the rest the standard L+L

[u/YobaiYamete]

Funny how many on this sub are still so far behind and are still claiming that defense platforms are bad. They've been absolutely nuts since Overlord dropped, especially when you have Orbital Rings adding their contributions in too

[u/AnemoneMeer]

I brought this up on the video, but there are some massive issues with the sort of "doctrine" this video suggests in regards to defense platforms.

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Defense platforms don't move. They're better, but they're stationary. If you're prebuilding defense platforms, then you're building something that will only generate value if it's actually attacked. Ask the French about the Maginot Line. It worked great until it didn't.

You generally don't want to prebuild defense platforms. You could build ships instead. Ships move. Moving good.

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Defense platforms build FAST. Like, absurdly fast. Their base build time is 60 days. That is nothing. They also build mid-combat if they have to. It's not unreasonable for defense platforms to start and finish over the course of a long combat.

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Neutron Launchers are stronger, but consume rare resources (at a fairly hefty cost per neutron launcher) and a LOT of alloys. Hangars cost significantly less alloys and no rare resources. Both have about equal holding power, but neutron launchers deal significantly more killing blows.

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Hangar defense platforms will start spamming ships from as far away as the base can engage from. With an ion cannon and range extension and sublight speed reduction, that is a VERY long range. With a fleet intercepting, this can be so far out that you aren't in danger of being shot at, at 375 range. Combined with an interception fleet, this can cause your hangars to build extreme amounts of strike craft from far beyond enemy range.

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This extreme engagement range means you can further skimp out on defense platform defenses. If you don't have armor, your defense platforms will die faster, but they still do just as much damage before being shot. If you don't have shields, you'll technically do more damage before being shot. Or we can even cut down the reactor a bunch too, further minimizing costs. Which lets us build very cheap defense platforms that will hold... mostly as well as far more durable ones, provided we have an interception fleet.

Like full evade destroyers. Which are faster than any oncoming threats, and likely have hyper relay aid to make them even faster still, and are great at stalling fights.

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Montu focuses on lethality of the starbase on its own far too much. That is not what is important. Defense platforms will not move and people will not suicide losing fleets into a starbase if they can help it, regardless of casualty count. The important thing is that the starbase holds back as much as possible, for as few resources as possible.

If you build just an Ion Cannon in advance, then respond to an oncoming incursion/threat of incursion by mass building armorless, shieldless hangars with a paired down reactor, you can build defensive platforms very quickly, very cheaply, and at the cost of... having to have ships defend your starbase. Which is something that you want to do anyway, because you can't stack nearly as much defensive power on a starbase, as a player can bring to bear fleet strength to crack it.

And when the tradeoff is having to do the thing you were gonna do anyway, that's not a tradeoff.

[u/CMDR_Kai]

Huh, I’ve been using fighter platforms. Guess I need to switch.

[u/[deleted]]

No missile platform test vs corvettes?

[u/rylasasin]

So due to some complaints/questions here I decided to do my own early game testing, testing the following parameters: 20 Corvettes, both in Missile and Interceptor configurations (and picket, but only for the Vs Missile and Vs Hangar tests, using . 8 Defense platforms in the Hangar, Large, Medium, Small, and Missile configurations. Each matchup (IE, Missile Corv vs Missile Platform) went up to 3 rounds.

Weapons were all basic.

Ships had Armor+Shield+Armor, again, basic.

To save you from a wall of text, I've posted the results of those tests in this here spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MVO-8v6CEwjOjIVtso5kk3P-VUqEYo8nLN9IULrGANM/edit#gid=0

The TL;DR results are such:

• L+L is not as good against early Corvettes as he's making it out to be, they took the most casualties especially against the 'missile' variety of Corvettes. The Corvs still lost handily, though, and they more than held their own against the 'Interceptor' variety (IE the type that the AI prefers to use in most cases.)

• Hangar types MURDERED the corvettes of any type. Even going in with the 'picket' variety of corvette with flak guns didn't help. In fact, if anything, it made it worse!

• Smalls performs about as well as Montau says it does.

• Mediums (which he didn't cover) are the worst DP config of all worlds, possibly barring Pickets (which I didn't even bother with for obvious reasons).

"Oh but players/ais/etc aren't going to come in with fleets of 20 corvettes! They're going to come in with overwhelming numbers!"

Good point. So I decided to take the 3 configs that worked best at defeating the corvettes (Hangar, Small, and Missile, also tried Large) To see how they fared against a 60 strong corvette dual-fleet of 30 each. Of course, this tanked the economy, but for this test, I gave zero shits about that.

As predicted, the Missile, Small, and Large varieties of DP lost to this massive Fleet.

BUT NOT THE HANGAR DP!!

Yeah, The Hangar DP Is THAT effective against corvettes, that it can hold of a fleet of 60 ships! Both the Interceptor and Missile varieties of Corvettes both lost HANDILY to the Hangar ones. Only 60 Picket Ships were able to beat the 8 Hangar Defense platforms, and not without taking a little more than half their fleets in damage.

And keep in mind, these were still armed with the basic scout wings, not the basic strike fighter.

So how many Corvettes does it actually take to beat an 8 platform H+H scout wing starbase?

75? Nope. Failure.

90? Nope, still fails.

100? No.

It took 120 Missile Corvettes to defeat the 8 scout wing hangar, It took 110 Interceptors to accomplish the same task, and even then, both took almost/over half their fleet in casualties.

[u/DM_Hammer]

The problem I have with platforms is that the AI's fleets will rapidly outscale your defenses, meaning they are likely fighting at unfavorable odds, and against an opponent who has almost no regard for losses. As far as I can tell, the AI generates nearly limitless alloys and poops out replacement fleet whenever it loses one, so no matter how bloody a defensive battle is, you still need to actually attack the AI to come out the winner.

[u/eliminating_coasts]

I wonder how these results would alter, if defence platforms had an extended strike craft engagement range to go along with the new extended weapon range? Probably wouldn't be exactly the same number, but it'd be interesting to test at what craft engagement boost the advantage of new extra-range defence platforms stays in keeping with their advantage over strike craft without either having a range boost.