Stellaris Destroyers vs Battleships - Is Destroyer Spamming More Effective?

destroy your spammer i have the high ground you underestimate my power don't try it you were the chosen one it was said that you would destroy them let's not join them bring balance were my brother i loved you [Music] we've seen what happens when battleships come across a swarm of corvettes but what happens when they come across a swarm of destroyers the bigger meaner brother of corvettes let's dive in and find out how we going to find out which is better well what we're going to do is we're going to run some experiments some tests i have a whole host of battleship and destroyer designs which i am going to be pitting against each other battleships against destroyers each fleet will have the same total naval capacity usage so we should have a fairly even fight in terms of naval cap in addition i'm going to be comparing the relative losses of each fleet relative to the total naval cap they started with as well as noting which fleet won the engagement which fleet was forced to retreat i'm going to be looking at fleets of size 80 and i'm also going to be comparing regular fleets with no admirals to fleets with a trickster admiral and the hit-and-run war doctrine why is this important well the hit-and-run war doctrine and the trickster admiral both give phenomenal bonuses to your disengagement chance which should help both fleets experience fewer casualties let's have a look at some ship designs the first thing to mention is that i tried out a wide variety of designs in initial testing just so that we could hone in and focus on the important and interesting designs so some of the designs that didn't make the cut included medium small small medium destroyers line battleships with a variety of weapon slots as well as battleships without a spinal weapon slot and the destroyers that were only pickets so let's start with the destroyer designs we are using all of these destroyers have one main thing in common and that is a large slot with a neutron launcher this is the first and arguably most important destroyer design we have a neutron launcher in the large slot as well as a kinetic weapon in the medium slot and an artillery combat computer and then i've given a comfortable variation on hull plating armor and shields next up is a bit of an anti-fighter variant here we swapped out the medium weapon swat slot for two picket weapon slots and we've given those the flat cannons to deal with fighters otherwise identical something to note as well is we've got the advanced afterburners on our destroyers that's to bring our evasion up at the moment these destroyers are at 52 percent evasion if we change to the picket center con sentient computer that's going to go up to around 57 evasion but still that's pretty high evasion it's not as high as a corvette which will easily be at 90 percent by this point but it's still up there and finally the third destroyer design i tried out was a large weapon slot with a neutron launcher and then two small weapon slots with stormfire auto cannons and as well as the picket combat computer now that combat computer has buffed our evasion which has gone up to 57 as you can see and that's at the expense of extra weapon range and a small amount of fire at five percent otherwise everything is basically at the maximum technology level because we're assuming an engagement at the end of the game in the in the late game now we've got the two battleship designs that i use well the first one we're going to look at is the carrier battleship we have a spinal mount two fighter bays with some stormfire auto cannons and then a large artillery slot on the stern with a neutron launcher the reason we've got these neutron launchers in is they are dealing a fantastic level of damage they have massive damage and they deal extra damage to hull and to armor really quite high levels we've also got two auxiliary modules on this ship to increase our hit ratio chance which will help us fight these high evasion ships if you notice here our evasion's at 11 as opposed to the 50 to 57 percent that the destroyers have and finally the core or backbone of the battleship class which is an artillery class battleship here we've given it an artillery computer the tachyon lance and four neutron launchers this is going to be the workhorse should be doing a lot of work but it will probably suffer against quite a lot of these destroyer designs because those neutron launchers don't have high tracking they don't have any tracking actually and neither does the tachyon lance so we're gonna have to see how they do let's dive into the results and have a look if there's any designs that i've missed out anything you would like me to have covered leave a comment below uh if there's enough support for it i'll probably have to do an update video looking at those designs if you've been enjoying this video and other videos on my channel please consider subscribing it will help get my videos out to other players like you let us start with the workhorse of the previous testing rounds the carrier battleship if you remember to my previous video corvettes vs battleships the carrier battleship was absolutely indomitable against the corvette swarms so let's see how that one did well there were engagements with the carrier battleship against the large medium destroyer to start with and interestingly the destroyers wiped the floor with the carrier battleships not only did the destroyers win both types of engagement the base engagement without any admirals or war doctrines and the engagement with both the trickster admiral and the hit-and-run war doctrine to maximize their disengagement chance for both sides they also outperformed the battleships and dealt more damage and caused more losses to the carrier strike groups then let's try the large picket destroyer so that's a large slot and two picket slots because i thought that well maybe against these carrier battleships the picket mounts instead of a medium weapon will enable them to perform better in actual fact the reverse happened once you included the picket slots the carrier battleship group completely annihilated the destroyer swarms and dealt massive casualties almost two to one and sometimes three to one casualties in terms of the losses as a proportion of the overall fleet size so against carrier battleships you want to be turning up with your large medium destroyers your neutron launcher and a kinetic weapon then there's the interesting engagement that's the artillery destroyers against the artillery battleships now with this one we've got both fleets engaging from a distance and as they come in the artillery battleships outrage the destroyers in terms of they have their x-slot weapon which is going to fire first that alpha strike does knock out a large group of destroyers at which point the destroyers are going to return fire with their neutral launchers but by this point there are less destroys to battleships so the battleships are fine four neutron launchers every two to three the destroyer fleet have to bring to bear and this is reflected in the results here we're seeing massive losses for the artillery destroyers as opposed to the artillery battleships but and this is an important thing to note whilst the losses are higher massively higher for the artillery destroyers they did win over half of the engagement so they did actually force the battleships to retreat uh even though they weren't inflicting as many casualties on the battleships proportionally so let's try to improve our destroyers let's swap out that artillery combat computer for a picket combat computer which should hopefully bring up our ability to evade the incoming fire but this is only going to add around five five evasion overall so it's not it's not going to save the day and what we see here is even worse losses now i have swapped out the medium weapon for two autocannon stormfire auto cannons because they'll be at the right engagement range with these pickets but overall it just doesn't work that it's uh even worse losses and in fact the artillery battleships win every engagement they not only inflict massive casualties they force the destroyers to retreat so what does this mean well it means that the large medium destroyers they are definitely what you want to be using to come up against your artillery battleships but you're probably going to take many more casualties than you inflict so the artillery battleships have a definite advantage with range because of their x-slot weapons and that is pushing them ahead but what happens if you can nullify that range advantage so we're going to look at the art of hyperlane camping so as you can see here what we what i've done is i've simulated your destroyers sitting on the edge of a system and waiting for a battleship group to jump in and when we do that not only do we see a doubling in the battleship casualties this also means the destroyers they win every engagement actually in the testing i think it was a single engagement that the battleships actually won when they jumped into a system but that was before i added war doctrines and the admiral including war doctrines in the admiral the destroyers won every engagement and dealt almost equivalent casualties to the battleship fleets so if you can keep a destroyer fleet hidden from your opponent if you can keep them in a nebula system on the edge waiting for a battleships to jump in you can pounce on them you can destroy them and you can eject them from the system otherwise if it's a straight-up engagement the battleship range of their x weapons is going to play a large part in causing massive casualties to your destroyers i did also try the large small small kinetic picket destroyers to see if with the hyperlink camping if that was even better because we had these small weapons on and the combat computer and in fact they performed worse than the large medium destroyers so it's quite clear large medium destroyers with artillery combat computers neutron launchers and a mixed with a kinetic medium weapon are the way to go if you're trying to take on battleships and if you happen to see any battleship carriers you should just run straight in and attack with your large medium destroyers they are going to be doing a lot of damage and a lot of work against any battleship carriers your opponent might have the misfortune of running overall as expected the battleships did perform better they consistently inflicted higher casualties to the destroyers but there were situations where they were repulsed from the engagement forced to retreat so as ever it's not completely clear-cut which is best and there are different situations you need to engineer to make sure that your fleets are going to win if you've enjoyed this video please leave a like if you've got any feedback for me please leave a comment down below and if you'd like to see more content like this please subscribe in addition if you'd like to support 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Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 22,266

Keywords: stellaris, stellaris nemesis, stellaris gameplay, stellaris destroyer build, stellaris nemesis ship designs, stellaris destroyer design, stellaris nemesis gameplay, stellaris 3.0, stellaris 3.0 guide, stellaris ship design, stellaris update 3.0, stellaris update, stellaris explained, montu plays, montu, stellaris battleship design, stellaris battleships vs destroyers, stellaris destroyers vs battleships, stellaris battleship build, stellaris battleship design 3.0

Id: eHLHuCuvXP4

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021