Stellaris Tachyon Lance vs Giga Cannon vs Arc Emitter - And War Doctrine Analysis

[Music] hold on sugar daddy's got a sweet guide [Music] somebody stop me the most powerful weapon we can equip our battleships with is a spinal mount weapon but which spinal mount weapon should we be using in this video i'm going to be presenting you with the results of some tests i've conducted to find out the answer to that very question in addition a little bit later on i'll also be looking at which is the best war doctrine to be using with our battleships equipped with these spinal mount weapons specifically when they're fighting other battleships equipped with spinal mount weapons which is very very common in the late game so let's have a look at some ship designs to keep these tests balanced the ship designs are basically identical with the only change being the spinal mount weapon that we have first we're going to look at the tachyon lance that's going to be equipped here on our battleship and we're going to have three neutron launchers and a kinetic artillery with this the reason i've got the neutron launchers and connect a single kinetic artillery is this was the results of the previous video i did where i tested the l slot weapons to find out which type of artillery weapon is the best one to use and this combination of kinetic artillery a single one of those with neutron launchers turned out to be the most powerful overall so i'm going to be using that in all of my designs in addition we've got the artillery combat computer we've got two auxiliary computers just to increase our hit chance we've got as many shields as we can grab in there which is three level five shields we could squeeze out some more shields by reducing our thrusters but that's not something i've done here here i've tried to keep it balanced in addition i've thrown in three crystal hull plates well crystal hull plates are generally going to be better than armor plating the reason for that partly and mainly is cost crystal hole plates are something you're going to probably have found or hopefully found by this late stage in the game where you've got these very powerful artillery battleships and it's going to cost no alloys and give you quite a lot of health the other option i could include here instead of the plating is armor and armor's going to cost me an extra 300 alloys on my battleships in terms of cost effectiveness you really want to be using the crystal hole plating at this late stage in the game if you would like me to do a full analysis video on exactly why that is comment down below and maybe i can check that out so the other two battleship designs will each have the focused arc emitter and the giga cannon those are the three x-slot weapons we have at our disposal let's take a look at some results first off how did the archimeter do against the other two weapon slots well against the other two weapon types the arc emitter lost really badly we're looking at a round uh taking taking somewhere in the region of 60 to 65 losses and only inflicting around 20 to 25 depending on the weapon type here the tachyon lance actually did slightly better than the giga cannon against those battleships but the error on this is actually such that they're quite close so how did the tachyon lamps do against the giga cannon well in this engagement it was quite a close one the losses were very similar on both sides but the tachyon lance actually did slightly worse than the giga cannon so here i saw that the giga cannon kind of took around 45 to 50 losses and inflicted almost 60 percent on the tachyon lance fleet but is this because of the crystal hull plating well i removed the crystal hole plating and i replaced that with armor and this is the ship design here you can see so with that ship design who came out on top well in this case with balanced fleets of the equal numbers the tachyon lance actually came out on top and did more damage to the giga cannon fleet we're looking at around 65 percent losses taken by the cannon fleet and around 45 to 50 losses taken by the tachyon lance fleet but it's really important to note here that each battleship armed with a tachyon lance here cost over 700 1700 alloys as opposed to only 1400 1450 so when i compared the two fleets to make them of equal resources which ended up being 17 battleships with tachyon lance against 20 battleships with the giga cannon the good cannon wiped the floor again with the tachyon lance fleet so the problem here really is that yes tachyon lance will beat giga cannon in a straight up engagement but the resources required to do so mean that the giga cannon is the better weapon over a long enough period of time the economics of the warfare will mean that the tachyon lance fleets which cost more to build with the armor to counter the giga cannon you're not going to be able to build as many of them you're going to be performing worse overall and that will mean that the giga cannon is the better weapon so of these three of these tests i've done it's kind of conclusive that the giga cannon is the one you want to be running with the the negatives to it uh the counters to it really only give negatives to the people attempting to counter them there there's really an issue here so i recommend you run fleets of giga cannons with neutron launchers on your battleships with a single kinetic artillery although having said that you might actually be able to swap that kinetic artillery out for another neutron launcher as you've already got the giga cannon pounding against shields it's really possible you want to swap that over but that's not something i tested here i wanted to keep all of the fleets balanced so there's something people have been asking me as well they've been asking me to try out the focused arc emitter with a bunch of cloud lightning and that is something i've looked at but i'm going to cover that at the end of the video first i'm going to look at the war doctrines you're going to want to run on your battleships and a comparison between the war doctrines to see in this case which war doctrine is going to be the best to use so what are our war doctrines what can we take well starting at the top we have defense in depth now that's going to give us a plus 10 fire rate bonus in home territory however as all of these tests are conducted in neutral territory then that's really going to do nothing for our engagement so for the purposes of this i'm going to be using defense in depth as our control which we can compare the others against next is a common one i've looked at a lot and that's hit and run hit and run is going to increase your combat disengagement chance by 33 and also reduce the emergency ftl damage you take by 25 or the risk of taking damage and losing the ship by 25 hit and run is very much a double-edged sword in as much as if your ships retreat yes they won't be taking damage but they also won't be able to deal damage so you'll find that your fleet will disappear more quickly and an equal engagement though this war doctrine can be used to devastating effect by skillful play third we have rapid deployment that's going to increase your sublight speed by 25 but more importantly it will give you a weapons range bonus of 10 in this case because i'm not doing kiting i'm not attempting to do anything like that which which is probably something you do want to be doing but for the purposes of these tests it's not something i feel i can repeat so i haven't looked at that but if you're not doing kiting ships weapon weapon range is going to give you a first strike capability against your opponent in this kind of engagement that can be pretty devastating and finally there is no retreat this one is only available if you have the militarist ethic or if you also are a gestalt what does it do well it gives you a 33 fire rate bonus but also gives you a plus 100 disengagement chance reduction which should mean and does mean your ships cannot disengage the fire rate bonus of 33 that is really good though that's going to increase the amount of times you're firing in every uh what would be three shots you'll have fired four shots so let's jump in and see what the results are 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 at this point in the game as no retreat is really the contender to beat i'm going to be comparing fleets with that war doctrine to other fleets and what happened well when no retreat came up against no uh war doctrine used and this is also no retreat and the range admiral equipped as well well against a fleet which had an admiral but it was the upkeep april so nothing really important this is our baseline and this is the defense in depth war doctrine which in neutral space is nothing so here we found that uh defense in depth took around 60 casualties and only inflicted around 20 percent to no retreat hit and run on the other hand we had slightly less losses taken by the hit and run fleet and they also had eight tricks to admiral but actually they inflicted slightly less losses but overall you know i really wouldn't recommend it seems taking hit and run at this late stage in the game on the other hand rapid deployment came out of the gate swinging they almost went toe to toe with no retreat no retreat want all of these engagements i should add as well all of the engagements but rapid deployment did inflict a significant number of casualties now if you were able to kite the rapid deployment fleet with that extra range you're going to find that the initial alpha strike from the rapid deployment will be massively reduced and you probably won't get these results but without doing that for instance if you're coming up against an ai who isn't going to be doing that you're going to be finding that rapid deployment works toe-to-toe but that was only looking at equal engagements what happens if we come up against a fleet which is larger than our fleet or smaller than our fleet which is really in solaris the majority situation you're going to find is not one of equal engagements for the purposes of testing the weapons i'd like to use equal engagement so we can find out which is better but when i'm testing these war doctrines i want to see the efficacy of them across a variety of situations so what have i done well i've reduced the number of ships on one side by 25 i've reduced them by about a quarter and what has that done to our overall numbers well first off i reduced the no retreat fleet by a quarter and even at this point actually they had very similar fleet strength to the other fleets they were engaging against the defense in depth the nun the no retreat fleet won between 40 to 50 percent of their engagements however whenever they lost they lost all of their ships which is the main issue here with no retreat so that meant over many engagements the no retreat fleet took higher casualties than the none fleet the fleet with defense in depth now also something to note here about this graph the losses here aren't as a percentage these are absolute number of battleships lost because we've got forces different size comparing the percentage losses i don't think would give correct results we actually really care about the number of ships lost because from an economic point of view we want to keep our losses to a minimum to win any walls so then when we included hit and run well what did we see we saw an increase in the losses for the no retreat fleet it's because they actually lost more engagements and in addition to that the hit and run fleet with the tricks to admiral they lost fewer ships so even this high level with neutron launchers and tachyon lances and giga cannons hit and run is still reducing our casualties and then finally against the rapid deployment fleet it was a complete trouncing the no retreat fleet lost every single engagement that's why they've got the 415 here because they didn't win a single one and they only inflicted minor losses to the rapid deployment fleet so this fleet with extra artillery range we did somewhat expect the no retreat fleet to lose here though it does highlight one of the key issues when they lose they lose big because you lose the entire fleet so let's look at what happens when when the force disparity goes in the other direction well when it goes in the other direction when we take away 25 percent of the other fleets we keep 100 of the no retreat ships what we see is that no retreat wins overall they do win all of their engagements which we can expect them to have done they won the engagements previously they would have continued to win here against smaller fleets but what we do see here is that hit and run as opposed to the uh defense in depth does cause you to have fewer losses although the fewer the loss reduction is very very small you're talking on average around a quarter of a battleship out of uh out of around 15 battleships so that's really nothing you want to be celebrating on the other hand rapid deployment did do quite well against the no retreat still and rapid deployment still managed to inflict actually quite a few casualties against the no retreat ships and if you compare that to when the force disparity was the other way around it's quite clear that rapid deployment was able to inflict more casualties and take fewer casualties so over a long enough number of engagements and engagements of different sizes and different volumes with different force disparities i would expect rapid deployment to outperform no retreat so really you either want to be running no retreat or rapid deployment on these battleships unless you're fighting in a highly defensive war and then perhaps defense in depth is going to be helpful for that extra 10 bonus to fire rate inside your territory and finally what happened when we had our cloud lightning are committed battleships up against our other two types of battles well they lost pretty badly yep they lost really quite badly inflicting around 10 to 20 percent of the casualties on the enemy fleet that they themselves took i did however then attempt to look at the economic difference here because there's a 400 alloy difference in the cost of a cloud lightning with our committed battleship as opposed to a giga cannon or tachyon lance battleship with your neutron launchers and that one kinetic artillery but when i compare that and look at 15 it was 15 against 20 was the ended up ship written numbers to keep it fair in terms of economics that still ended up with the cloud lightning archimetal battleships losing and again losing badly not losing as badly as before so it's possible you could run them but don't expect them to be able to outperform tachyon lances or mega cannons with neutron launchers and kinetic artillery the economic advantage of the cheaper ships is outweighed by their inability to actually perform and deal damage i hope this can close a chapter in the people who are really quite interested in seeing how cloud lightning does and the arc emitters yes they do bypass the shields and armor but they still aren't doing as well as tachyon lance's and the like and uh your regular energy and kinetic weapons in summary the giga cannon is the best weapon you're going to want to equip on your artillery battleships followed closely by the tachyon lance and then finally the focused archimeter is the worst of the three in addition the war doctrines you're going to want to run are either the no retreat although you'll have to be very careful to not engage the enemy when you are weaker and in addition to that you could also try running the rapid deployment that extra artillery range is going to be really useful for getting an alpha strike in if you can and really try not to run cloud lightning it won't go well in multiplayer games against player ships or against something like the starnet ai which is producing quite strong battleships this wraps it up for this 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Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 48,242

Keywords: Stellaris, Stellaris nemesis, stellaris gameplay, stellaris tachyon lance vs giga cannon, stellaris tachyon lance, stellaris tachyon lance vs arc emitter, stellaris giga cannon, stellaris arc emitter, stellaris war doctrine, stellaris guide, montu plays, stellaris 3.0, stellaris nemesis, stellaris nemesis gameplay, stellaris ship design, stellaris weapon components, stellaris weapon comparison

Id: GQaq4eN-iR4

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021