Stellaris Neutron Launchers vs Kinetic Artillery - Is Cloud Lightning Better?

they say the best weapon is one you never have to fire i respectfully disagree i prefer the weapon you only have to fire once that's how dad did it that's how he does it and it's worked out pretty well so far [Music] for your consideration neutron launchers can anything stand up to the massive alpha strike potential of neutron launchers we're going to be looking at some different weapon types we're going to be looking at kinetic artillery neutron launchers and then we're also going to take a look at cloud lightning now i've been getting lots and lots of comments in videos why am i using neutron launchers why don't i use kinetic artillery why am i not using cloud lightning these are all large slot weapons and today we're going to test them out to find out which is best and which we should really leave at home how are we going to conduct these tests well we're going to have two fleets both of 20 battleships apiece fully kitted out with large slots so that will be six large slots each and then we'll be filling them with some armor some shields some different combinations as well as some of the auxiliary components and then we're going to pit battleship fleets against each other in a battle royale to find out which weapon is the best to fit inside of our large slots i'm going to be focusing on which fleet actually wins the engagement and forces the other fleet to retreat as well as the losses incurred by both sides i'm also going to try out the fleets with no war doctrines or admirals and then i'm also going to add the hit and run war doctrine and the trickster admiral which will give us a higher retreat chance i had disengagement chance for our ships which should mean that more ships survive one thing i'm not going to be doing i'm not going to be fitting any spinal weapons to these ships i'll be doing a future video on which spinal mount weapon is best but for now we're just looking at the large slots everything's also going to have artillery combat computers so let's dive in and take a look at some designs in the first engagement with the neutron launchers versus kinetic artillery i'm going to fit both ships with an even mixture of armor and shields and i'm going to give them both the auxiliary slot which will provide a plus 10 to our hip chance both designs of course also have the artillery combat computer that's going to be the best one that i'm going to be using here in addition we've just got maxed out technology on everything without any of the special technologies like the crystal hole plating or the dark matter thrusters or deflectors you can get from the fallen empire this is meant to represent a late game fleet that hasn't engaged the fallen empire yet and defeated them and then finally we have the cloud lightning battleships for these battleships i've fitted a mixture of hull and armor and i've given them the additional hit chance on their auxiliary computers they've also got the same artillery combat computers and generally are the same as the other battleship types the only real difference here between any of the battleships should be their weapons let's start at the very beginning let's start with neutron launchers against kinetic artillery well in this test what we saw was the neutron launch has absolutely eviscerated the kinetic artillery we're looking at around 75 losses for the kinetic artillery fleet in comparison to only only around 15 to 20 losses for the neutron launcher fleet when you include war doctorates and an admiral then you you get slightly fewer losses for the kinetic artillery fleet but you almost halved the losses for neutron fleets so really here it's quite clear kinetic artillery is not the way to beat a fleet with neutron launchers also it's kind of important to note here the reason there are only two sets of data points is that the kinetic fleet was forced to retreat it actually lost the engagement before it had the chance to retreat manually so at no point did it ever actually get the chance to retreat how about the mighty cloud lightning well let's start by testing that off against our kinetic artillery the loser of the first engagement and here we can see that cloud lightning is massively outperformed by kinetic artillery the cloud lightning is dealing casualties similar to the uh casualties that the kinetic artillery dealt to neutron launches so the comparison here really i think i have to draw is that neutron launchers are much better than kinetic artillery in a straight up fight and the amount that they are better by is the same amount that kinetic artillery are then better than cloud lightning by because what we're seeing here is we're seeing the engagement range and the the range of our weapons on the kinetic artillery vastly outstrips that of the cloud lightning so the cloud lightning is really not going to do that well later on if you've got i don't know a hundred lots of the repeatable technologies for increased armor and shields maybe the cloud lightning is going to start pulling ahead because it's going to be able to cut through all of that armor and shields but but until there's vast vast stacks of repeatables i really can't see how it could pull its weight something else to note as well with this engagement is that when you include the war doctrines of the admiral the cloud lightning battleship losses do go down dramatically and that's due to the fact that kinetic artillery has both a high rate of fire and a relatively low weapon damage output compared to something like a neutron launcher which is going to increase our chance of disengagement happening which will then decrease the losses for the cloud lightning battleships and now the tough engagement neutron launchers versus cloud lightning well is it that tough no the neutron launchers absolutely wipe the floor with cloud lightning they really did massive damage even with war doctrines and the full admiral the level of damage output for the cloud lightning losses were identical almost identical to without so what that really shows us here is that neutron launchers are a very very powerful weapon you see that high damage burst means you can get a massive alpha strike at long range they've got really good bonuses against hull plus 75 and then when you do this big damage burst that really reduces the disengagement chance for enemy ships because you do a big burst of damage but you'll only do a few shots overall that'll bring down their chance throughout the fight of disengaging if you understand what i'm saying but this really kind of conclusively does show us that cloud lightning is vastly inferior to both the kinetic artillery and the neutron launcher i really don't recommend you equip your ships with it it's really going to underperform and that's not even here i haven't included any crystal hull plating now if you had crystal hull plating a couple of uh modules of that on our ships the the ability of the cloud lightning would go down even further so really what we can see from the data here is that neutron launchers outperform kinetic artillery is it better to be feared or respected and i say is it too much to ask for both but what happens if you have a fleet of kinetic artillery battleships and you know you're about to come up against a fleet of neutron launcher battleships and vice versa so in this test what i'm going to do is i'm going to change the designs here are the designs i'm going to use and as you can see on the kinetic artillery battleships i've added lots and lots of shields which the neutron launchers are very weak against and on the neutron launcher battleships i've added lots of armor on the kinetic ships i've had to also add some modules to increase increase the power because the problem you've got here is that your shields require large amounts of power whereas armor doesn't five shields five of these hypershields is the most i'm going to be able to get on a ship here so what were the results so here i found that the kinetic artillery still had the floor wiped with them massive losses two to three times as many losses as the neutron launchers and then when you added war doctrines in as well that gave a real edge to the neutron launcher battleships with those war doctrines involved the neutron launchers were able to disengage much more frequently than the kinetic artillery battleship so overall here we are looking really at why neutron launchers are the weapon you want to go with in your large slots wherever possible they've got a higher accuracy than kinetic artillery they may have a lower fire rate but that massive damage output is going to really help in addition you're also going to find that the the plus 75 bonus you're getting to damage against hull is going to be very very helpful now of course if you're coming up against something which has got a lot of corvette screens in front of it or you've got some baiting going on or something like that and you can bait out that first alpha strike with the neutron launchers we're going to see some different results but i've not done that that takes some skill and finesse and i didn't really want to be trying to repeat that methodically in this set of experiments so we've seen that the kinetic artillery is definitely outclassed by the neutron launchers when you're fighting ship to ship but what if we took a neutron launcher battleship and we replaced just a few slots with kinetic artillery would that provide us with a better battleship well let's have a look so i tested out uh replacing one two and three slots with the kinetic artillery the best results i found were when i just replaced a single slot of course there'd be differences based on the number of shields you had but here we're going to have three shield modules and three r modules simply taking the very first design for the neutron launcher battleship and replacing in a single kinetic artillery so what effect did this have on our results well when i fought the just pure neutron launcher battleships with these neutron launcher plus a single kinetic artillery battleships we had victory for the mixed battleships the mixed battleships actually in the the base engagement so that's without war doctrines and an admiral one every single engagement when we included the war doctrines and admiral there were there were a couple of losses for the mixed design fleet but overall they won most of the engagements whereas when i increased the number of kinetic artillery batteries we got worse and worse results from our battleships so what we're kind of looking at here really is that the adding kinetic artillery it's not going to cause more casualties to your the opposing forces not really because that kinetic artillery is going to increase their chances of disengaging due to the higher fire rate and lower damage output but what you will be able to do against a player opponent or the ai if they're running the same design but most likely a player opponent is you're going to be able to force them to retreat most of the time of course this is still variable to big spiking if you get a big spike with an alpha strike against against either fleet the fleet that had the big alpha strike is going to win if their numbers spike high so overall i'd actually say that you probably want to be including at least one kinetic artillery battery on your artillery battleships of course in any proper engagement you're going to be replacing those front slots with a spinal weapon slot and i obviously haven't looked into that in this video i'll be looking at that in one of my next and future videos the which x-slot weapon is the best but in summary what we can take from this is that neutron launchers are the most powerful even if you're fighting a fleet which has opposed shields to your neutrons you're still going to want to take neutrons over fighting as fleet with kinetic artillery and they have opposed armor you're going to win with the neutrons in addition to that cloud lightning really suffers against both the kinetic artillery and the neutron launchers it's really not up there in the same league as either of those two weapons now that result with the cloud lightning is probably something that some of you are going to find that you completely disagree with if you do leave a comment below let me know how you think i could have tested that weapon in a better way i think this is a reasonably controlled environment with reasonable uh controls where things were kept at a similar level and baseline but of course there are designs and tests i haven't looked at here so overall the neutral launchers are going to be better than the kinetic artillery the kinetic artillery and the neutron launchers both are better than cloud lightning to optimize your battleships though you probably want to take mostly neutron launchers with a single kinetic artillery weapon in your large slots and that about wraps it up for this video if you enjoyed it please leave a like if you've got any feedback for me please leave a comment and if you'd like to see more content like this please subscribe in addition uh there's a link to patreon down below in the description if you'd like to support this channel

Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 40,609

Keywords: Stellaris, Stellaris nemesis, stellaris gameplay, stellaris neutron launcher vs kinetic artillery, stellaris neutron launcher, stellaris cloud lightning, stellaris ship design, montu plays, montu plays stellaris, stellaris nemesis gameplay, stellaris 3.0, stellaris multiplayer, stellaris guide, stellaris 2021, stellaris ship design 3.0, stellaris kinetic artillery, stellaris kinetic vs energy, stellaris large weapons

Id: 63qV3AKV9TY

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021