Stellaris Ship Designer Guide - Everything You Could Want To Know!

hello player what's happening um i'm gonna need you to go ahead and design your own ships so if you could be here around nine that would be great okay so you want to design your own ships but you're unsure exactly what everything in this ship designer means it's a complicated ship designer there is a lot of information on offer in this guide we're going to go through what everything that you can see on the screen means and how that's important in the game let's dive in in order to design your own ships using the ship designer the first step is to uncheck this auto generate designs box once you've done that you can start editing and creating and saving your own designs okay so let's jump into this and look at the meat and potatoes so there's two ways of creating a new design first you can take an existing design rename it save it and then you'll have a new design so for instance let me do that so there's now destroyer one and destroyer otherwise i can click create choose a shipped type that i want to design a class the first thing you'll notice here is that i need to assign sections to my ship but what are sections well sections allow you to choose the specific makeup of component slots you're going to have on your ship different ship classes have different possible sections available uh here i've selected two sections for my ship i've got a gunship section and an interceptor ship section now those come with some uh components i can put weapon components up here in the top and i can put utility components down here in the bottom it's also important to note that on the right here you can see there are a series of components that all ships must come with and we'll cover those in a little bit now what kind of components can we have on our ships there are a variety of types with different slot sizes and different slot types now what are they there are small medium and large slots most weapons have these there are x slots those are only available to the large battleships there are also g-slots now these slots are missile slots p slots which are point defense slots these are for weapons too which are in theory meant to take out enemy missiles or enemy strike craft and finally h slots which are hangers or strike craft now there is a bit of a difference between the small medium large slots and i'm going to explain what that is so when you hover over a weapon you get a breakdown of these stats for that weapon as you go from a small weapon to a large weapon values are going to change the damage is going to increase the tracking is going to decrease and the range is going to increase that is a general rule of thumb what does that mean well that means that larger weapons have lower tracking tracking is good at letting you hit ships with higher evasion meaning smaller ships smaller ships have high evasion whereas larger ships have very low evasion so as you increase your weapon size your weapons will deal more damage they will have a longer range but their tracking will be diminished it's also important to note that there is an equivalency between slots if we look at this ship we can see that there i could either choose a gunship bow which is too small and one medium slot or an artillery bow just one large slot this shows us that a medium slot is equivalent to two small slots and a large slot is equivalent to two medium slots but as you increase the weapon size for instance going from a small weapon to a large weapon let's look at this laser here the average damage or the damage does not scale that way so a small weapon is less than four times as powerful as a large weapon a small weapon here we look the average damage is 2.15 meaning that it's around 8.6 damage per uh on average whereas a large weapon is 12.9 that is four damage average more so about 50 percent more than four of the equivalent small weapons so the bigger weapons are more powerful have a longer range and are more easily able to strike the large ships in your opponent's fleets x-slot weapons are the some of the most powerful weapons in the game they have very large range zero tracking relatively reasonable accuracy but they pack a phenomenal punch in terms of damage you see here 600 to 1500 and 800 to 2000 that's per shot missile weapons have something a little interesting that is a retargeting range and some uh hull points evasion and speed of the actual missile this is because when a missile fires it doesn't immediately hit the target it does actually have to travel to the target and it can be shot down or intercepted on route the retargeting range is the range at which if your missile is shot at a target if that target is destroyed what other enemy ship can it then choose to target instead because it will not simply vanish or cease to function if its initial target is destroyed before it arrives it will choose a new target and attempt to hit that target and finally point defense here that's basically the same as your small weapons except it only fits in a point defense slot and has a different target priority the guardian point defense so this is anti-missile that will shoot missiles first the flak will shoot uh will shoot strike craft first now we have utility slots how do they work well it's important to note actually first off when you're adding components you in the beginning will only get to see the most up-to-date technological component you have as well as only components that will fit that particular slot if you want to add components which are quote obsolete for instance let's say i wanted to squeeze a little bit more shield onto my ship i could add a small deflector here increasing my shield hit points by a small amount but that isn't the most up-to-date component to do that i would have to uncheck this box now in here you want to fit a balance of shields armor and crystal plating in testing i've done testing i found that because of the low low value of crystal plating for instance here it's 0.25 crystals as opposed to 22 alloys meaning that uh crystal plating can be a very very cheap component to use rather than using armor which is generally twice the alloy cost or if not yet twice the alloy cost of shields meaning that you probably want to run shields and crystal plating if you can get your hands on it on your ships next components let's look at which components we have available there is a whole heap afterburners they're going to increase your evasion and speed but that's a multiplicative bonus to invasion so that isn't just a five percent of evasion that's five percent of the evasion value you had as a percentage before so instance if your evasion in this case was 47 we're getting 10 of that so plus 4.7 not an extra plus 10 percent here so that's something to note regenerative whole tissue is fine there are some interesting uses for it but in a straight up engagement it's not that helpful reactor boosters they're going to increase your power generation which can be useful usually i wouldn't recommend them auxiliary fire control that's one of the best components in the game it's going to increase your hit chance and then you've got shield capacitors increasing your overall shield points very useful on larger ships which have many shields specifically titans they can be very very powerful when used there generally i'd recommend now that generally i'd recommend your auxiliary fire control shield capacitor or the afterburners if you really need that extra evasion though generally auxiliary fire control is usually going to be more useful finally we have our necessary components which you can see here on the right hand side let's start at the top with power this is our reactor it generates power for our ship then we have the drive this allows your ship to travel between systems ftl the better your drive the the lower the amount of time you need to charge up your drop drive to jump from a system this won't increase the speed between systems but it'll increase your overall travel time to a system because when you reach the edge of the system you then have to start charging your drive before flying off then there are thrusters thrusters will increase your speed and your chance to evade the larger your ship design the lower this chance to evade bonus you're going to get from your thrusters at battleships it is very very low indeed counter to thrusters we have sensors sensors add tracking which is useful to negate evasion they also increase the sensor range of your ships unsurprisingly meaning that you can see other ships and other systems at a larger and larger range with better sensors finally we have combat computers combat computers change the not only the range at which you're going to engage the enemy which between the swarm through to picket line and artillery will be at a close range 30 50 and 80 range that's going to be the range at which you'll your ships will attempt to sit and fire at the enemy it'll also increase a number of other bonuses on your ship depending on the type of combat computer so first we have the uh we have the corvette now corvettes have swarm and picket combat computers swarm combat computers increase your invasion and ship fire rate picket combat computers increase your tracking and ship fire rate these two are kind of counter to each other as tracking is useful to negate evasion next to our destroyers they have the picket combat computers just like the corvettes but they also have line and artillery combat computers line combat computers increase your chance to hit although the problem with that is a chance to hit what does that mean that increases the accuracy of your weapon weapon accuracy is useful i'll go over that in a little bit exactly how that works but you should never increase your weapon accuracy above 100 there is no need on larger ships you'll probably have one or two auxiliary fire controls making a line combat computer pretty useless if you've got any 90 accuracy weapons like oh i don't know neutron launchers so line combat computers can be used though it's it's a tricky trade-off there artillary combat computers on the other hand have increased range now why is range useful well there are two stats that are very important to your ships there are fire rate and range fire rate increases the or should i say decreases the amount of time that it takes your ships to fire which then means over a longer period of time or a long engagement if your ships have a higher fire rate than the enemy you're going to win that battle because you'll be able to consistently hit them faster and more times than they are able to hit you on the other hand weapon range is going to help you with the initial part of the engagement if you are able to strike them hard and fast at the beginning you'll knock out more ships of your opponents than they're able to knock out of yours leaving you with more ship to continue the engagement and hopefully win the combat overall so weapon range is really important before the engagement starts but as an engagement continues fire rate is the deciding factor the final component type that we have all computer type we have is carrier it's pretty useless to be quite frank it increases your engagement rates that's good but that is the only bonus it gives a single ship with this engagement range i believe will increase the engagement range of your fleet and then from that point onwards you don't need any other ships with them it could be good to have a single ship of this design and the rest with probably something like an artillery combat computer if you're fighting large ships or a picket combat computer if you're fighting small ships we've got a whole bunch of values on the right hand side here what do they mean well the first one we have is a load of production values that being build time that is the number of days it will take to build a ship and this is the base build time you can reduce this number by having governors that reduce the build time having uh the leader of your empire or civilization can have special traits that will reduce this build time you can have agendas that reduce the build time and you can also have a special mega shipyard that will vastly reduce the build time next we have upkeep upkeep is a function of the overall ship cost based on the cost of the components and the uh and the base cost of the ship class it's important to note here upkeep is both alloys and energy so the more ships you have the more you will be eating into your alloy production and therefore the less ships you can continue to build and as well as that you do of course need to maintain your energy production in order to maintain a fleet of any large size and finally we have the cost this here is the cost of the ship this will be alloys and special resources it's important to note here that this cost can also be reduced by having the correct traits on governors or of sectors or for instance having the correct traits on your uh civilization leader and that sort of thing finally we have the ship stats let's go through them and then we can kind of explain more in detail what all that other stuff meant earlier so we've got power this is a net value it is your power generation minus all of the components you have on your ship if you have excess power and have a lot of it it's going to increase some of the stats of your different uh if you're different ships so it will increase the evasion speed and damage by a percentage if you have some excess power the amount of excess power you need is phenomenal for instance here i have 300 excess power that's almost 30 percent of my power not being used and that only adds a 2 bonus to my overall damage output not very much you don't really want to be chasing excess power you want to be matching your power requirements quite nicely to your ship's components next we have hull points this is the number of hit points your ship can take or the amount of damage you can take before it's destroyed as you take damage as your whole point is decreased the damage output of your ship will be decreased as well in addition if you take any damage while your ship is below 50 of its hull points there is a chance that it will evade based on the value of all the amount of damage your ship receives then you have armor and shields these two are similar to hull points though as they reduce they don't impact the effectiveness of your ship and if they go to zero your ship will not be destroyed shields will regenerate while you are not at a starbase while you're anywhere whereas armor and hull points will only be regenerated with specific traits a specific module like the regenerative hull tissue or if you are docked at a starbase next we have evasion so i mentioned earlier accuracy or chance to hit so that is the accuracy or chance to hit is the percentage chance you have to hit your opponent but if you score a hit does that mean you've hit them ironically no it doesn't not all of the time what it does mean is that you've now given them a chance to evade you so what is evasion well evasion is the chance a ship has to negate the shot that you've taken against them so for instance this is an invasion of 19.5 meaning that there is a 19.5 percent chance this cruiser will evade any hit it takes however evasion is negated by tracking so in order to work out the evasion chance you take the evasion you get you take away the opponent's tracking value down to a minimum of zero and that is then the chance they have to roll for evasion so with corvettes they have very high evasion you can get up to 90 that's the maximum value you can have for evasion and it's important in order to be able to hit them to have high tracking on the other hand battleships have very low evasion that if this invasion here 11.7 that's going to be counted straight off the bat by tap by any sensors so you actually don't need any tracking on your battleship weapons or any weapons that are aiming to target battleships because your sensors should probably deal with the invasion straight away next we have speed uh ships range in speed of base speed up to battleships and battleships have the lowest speed whereas corvettes have the highest speed better thrusters will increase the speed of your ships by adding a percentage bonus to that base speed but it's still as ever important to note that this base speed isn't necessarily that useful it can be good to get around places very quickly but in some battleship designs you'll see especially in competitive games players will reduce the uh thrusters in order to have more power available to go into something like shields and finally damage this is just the average damage your ship will do per day it's important to note here with damage that specific weapons have bonuses or reductions when shooting against a specific type of hit point whether that's armor shield or hull for instance here kinetic artery gets a 100 bonus in damage to shield a 50 reduction against armor and a 25 bonus to hull that can be important when designing your ships because you want to be designing defenses to counter your opponent's weaponry finally there are special values here those are piracy suppression and sensor range sensor range is the range at which your ships can detect other things and and have visual access to other adjacent systems sensor range of four means you have access to four uh systems up to four uh hyperlink lane jumps away piracy suppression is when your ship is in a specific spot that is the value the reduction of value or the value at which you can reduce piracy in that sector or that system so we've gone through all the components what does all of this mean well let's take a design i've made already you want to be building ships with a specific role or function in any fleet for instance this destroyer i built here has weapons with high tracking for instance we've got these beam weapons the lasers or energy weapons and we've got auto cannons these weapons have very high tracking they're going to be really good at fighting and anything with high evasion like corvettes for instance 75 tracking here plus the 15 or even sorry 30 from this picket combat computer and my sensors giving me a tracking well over 100 meaning that i will be completely negating all evasion from enemy ships on the other hand this destroyer design is aimed more at taking on large ships i've got a large weapon a neutron launcher which does a lot of damage but has very low tracking and i've gone with an artillery combat computer to give me that extra right weapons range let's go for a brief rundown of the weapons we have available so we can discuss what we can put on our ship so first off lasers these weapons are anti-armor but they have a reduction against shields they do have higher accuracy than something like a plasma throw now plasma throw is to all intents and purposes a better weapon than a laser but it does have lower tracking so again something like corvettes you probably want to be going with lasers rather than plasma accelerators but against anything else and i would include destroyers in that you want to be using plasma accelerators as your energy weapons of course if you have access to l slots you do instead want to be going with neutron launchers they are hands down the best weapon in the game at the moment they do whopping damage to hull they're fantastic we've got a bit of the opposite thing going on with kinetic weapons with kinetic weapons if you have a small weapon you want to go with auto cannons also cannons have great anti-hull weaponry anti-hull damage really high tracking but they only come in small size that means that you can only really use them in an anti-corvette capacity otherwise you'd want to be having a larger weapon deal with larger ships so if you're running medium or medium weapons you'll want to be going with the railguns basically the generic kinetic mass driver weaponry unfortunately at the moment picket slots really are not useful uh they don't work in the way they're intended to you're much better off taking a an equivalent weapon for instance i could have two picket defense slots here or a single medium it'd be better to take the medium weapon because i'd be dealing more damage destroying more enemy ships and reducing their firepower that way than only interacting with a single type of weapon that was incoming in terms of torpedoes there are three varieties you've got your generic variety starting with nuclear missiles these deal extra damage against hull and they can be really good against fighting fighting against ships with crystal plating and shields and as crystal plating and shields is one of the most effective varieties you'll want to put these weapons on your corvettes really only corvettes the one of the ships you're going to place them on you can place them on cruisers it's not worth it i've done the testing check out one of my ship design videos if you don't believe me on the other hand you've got the whirlwind missiles now these deal are much lower damage but are able to evade point defense as when you're playing the ai maybe they might run point defense but if you're playing a player they're really not going to be running point defense it's better to be running if you're going to choose a missile one of the high damage dealing missiles that deals extra damage to hull than that we have torpedoes why are torpedoes useful they have very high flat damage output a high damage burst is means that your opponent finds it much more difficult to disengage a higher damage will cause a on a single instance a higher disengaged chance but due to a reduction in number of shots this will mean that over a longer period of time there is a lower chance that they will retreat and instead you will be able to destroy the ship so torpedoes can be really useful although they do deal anti-armor damage at a higher rate than regular missiles which deal uh anti-hull damage at a higher rate finally we have the x-slot weaponry you always want to take an x-slot if it's available to you it is the best damage dealer in the game with fantastic range and i would recommend the giga cannon though possibly later in the game you want to go for a bypass weapon like the archimeter now let's briefly talk about the bypass weaponry we have disruptors that come in small and medium yes they have 100 accuracy but something like a neutron launcher has 90 so with two auxiliary fire controls we're suddenly at the same accuracy level as a disruptor so yes it's 100 accuracy but it's not that more than a regular weapon with a regular number like 90. yes they have reasonably okay tracking at 60 percent but their damage is so low that while they do completely ignore shield and armor generally they're not worth it if you're running against something like a fallen empire though yes you are going to be wanting to take bypass weaponry because if you look at their stats there shields and armor are a massive massive or it's two-thirds or three-quarters of the overall hit points of the ship and in the late game with repeatables it could be possible that these weapons are more along the lines of what you're wanting to run as repeatables will add increases to shield and armor value whilst uh whilst not changing hull points and finally we have strikecraft what's the deal with strikecraft well they're able to shoot down missiles they're able to shoot down enemy strike craft and they have such high accuracy and tracking they completely negate the evasion of ships like corvettes this allows you to have battleships with an anti-corvette weapon so carrier battleships are excellent at taking out corvettes however they are not as good as artillery that's the top and bottom of it they take a while to get to their enemy to cross the system if you don't believe me check out please check out some of my testing videos where i've i've demonstrated this however you can ragoons is actually demonstrated and i'll link that video down below in the description how you can cause your strike craft to engage early and therefore um uh if you engage something like a mining station in a system you can get them out into space early meaning that you will actually be able to engage with them a bit sooner making them more effective but that's quite a tricky thing to do it's very fiddly i wouldn't recommend trying it

Channel: Montu Plays

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Keywords: Stellaris, Stellaris nemesis, stellaris gameplay, stellaris ship designer, stellaris ship designer tutorial, stellaris ship designer guide, montu plays, montu plays stellaris

Id: o68YWe-L5J4

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021