I know that I have already made another thread like this in the past, but it has become obsolete with Disharmony. Needless to say, Disharmony improved a lot the AI, making it much more agressive, and this is a good thing. But it also means that I will have to learn to fight, and I will also have to retreat from the medium difficulty to easy.



Now, I need to know the strategies that you, experienced galactic generals, use to design your ships, from early games - when you don't have that much weapons and ships - to late games - when you have all of the weapons and ships.



This GIF show exactly my combat situation in ES (my fleets are sometimes ineffective against the enemy fleets):

I've noticed that the AI tends to start their ships with kinetics and deflectors even when they have access to other tech. They'll change once they begin fighting you and other AIs, though. This might also vary depending on the faction they have, the difficulty and sometimes just randomly anyway. The only time I've encountered radically different loadouts on first contact was Hissho against Cravers. Expecting kinetics but getting missiles was, well...

Just looking at the stats in Disharmony, it seems that small ships benefit more from armor and larger ships more from defenses. 33 Weight will give you one defense of each type, which is about +100% to +200% effective HP depending on tech levels. For large ships, that's well worth it compared to paying 5% of weight for a mostly-fixed HP armor module. On a small ship, though, 5% of weight is not much at all, and the HP gain relative to the base hull is relatively larger.

One thing to take note of is with Disharmony, each affinity now has different perks on their ship sizes (I stuck them all here for easy comparisons), so a lot of it depends on which faction you are and which ship size you're currently playing with. For example, Sophon ships are insanely specialized because they not only have a bonus, but they come with a penalty as well.

The general consensus seems to be like this:

Keep your weapons locked on vanilla ranges for now. M kinetics, MR beams, LR missiles. The other ranges aren't very balanced. That being said, until the pilot ability that adds 100minimum and 100 maximum to every shot is nerfed or fixed (VERY OP), you can actually spam melee kinetics with pilots heroes and destroy fleets, but there is no way this will be viable for long. Only do this for giggles. Also, in vanilla ES it was the norm to stack 1 type of weapon on a ship, however with Disharmony it is viable to stack different weapons due to how defenses work now (%damage reduction instead of dodging the weapons now). This doesn't mean different weapons are better and they may be worse still, but it better than it was in vanilla.



There is /#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/10403-flak-modules to see how defenses work. For basic ships you only need 1 of each defense (once you get tonnage upgrades maybe 2).



For support modules, it depends. I like to bring some "invasion" ships with my fleet, but if I am going against full out military fleets then I have 2 fleets myself, 1 military and 1 invasion. Depending on how you set it up depends on how you create your ships. In the former case I like to make the ships t2 and have a lot of def and armor along with invasion (siege, bombs, and troops depending on how much space). For the latter, you can essentially build nothing but pure invasion with perhaps a engine to get you there faster.



For special modules, simply put, if you are having issues winning battles, don't use them. They are woefully inefficient compared to weapons at the moment until things are better balanced. I personally like seeing squads of fighters, but if you are losing then replace fighters with more weapons/defences and you should have much better luck in battles.

Zerrigan wrote:
The general consensus seems to be like this:

Keep your weapons locked on vanilla ranges for now. M kinetics, MR beams, LR missiles. The other ranges aren't very balanced. That being said, until the pilot ability that adds 100minimum and 100 maximum to every shot is nerfed or fixed (VERY OP), you can actually spam melee kinetics with pilots heroes and destroy fleets, but there is no way this will be viable for long. Only do this for giggles. Also, in vanilla ES it was the norm to stack 1 type of weapon on a ship, however with Disharmony it is viable to stack different weapons due to how defenses work now (%damage reduction instead of dodging the weapons now). This doesn't mean different weapons are better and they may be worse still, but it better than it was in vanilla.

.

Well that explains why that one fleet with a pilot hero was annihilating every fleet of mine without breaking a sweat even when the fleets were very even power wise.

I'm still playing my first game on Easy, but here's something I've been working on and it seems to work against the AI, not sure about multiplayer. What I've noticed is that your first 3 ships are targeted first. I wish we could know what formation the AI is using. Anyways, you should load your first 3 ships for defense and max Armor. So how do we determine that? Your ship formation, the default formation puts the ships on top with the highest hitpoints first.



I load my Destroyers with an Engine Module and nothing but either Beams or Missiles. I do half Beams and half missiles. No defense. I then use the Cruiser, Battleship, and Dreadnaught to soak up damage. I load them up with 2-3 Deflectors, 3-4 Shields, and 3-4 Flaks, and then add as much Armor as I can fit with the Engine Module and Tonnage Modules also added. You should be able to fit at least 1 Weapon Module on Cruiser/Battleship and 3 on the Dreadnaught after everything else is applied first. As you advance the tech tree, you'll gain more tonnage. The fleet's Military Power might be lower than other Fleet designs, but it's a max/min type of Fleet design and will wipe out most enemy fleets by Phase 1 or 2 which might allow a Phase 3 for the Healing card. Ultimately, my fleet consists of 8 Destroyers (4 Beam & 4 Missiles), 2 Battleships/Cruisers (1 Beam & 1 Missile), and 1 Dreadnaught (1 Missile). You can also try 1 Dreadnaught and 12 Destroyers. I like a lot of movement which is why I usually add the Engine Module to all my ships. Of course of you were playing multiplayer, you can always loose the Engine or Tonnage Modules. Being able to pump out cheap Destroyers and cheap Cruisers early on is key.



I look at my opponents ships and either try to anticipate what cards the AI is going to play, or I just try to block or evade the phase the AI plans on doing the most damage. The AI likes to take Weapon Modules out of their designed ranges. I see a lot of Kinetic Modules set for Medium range. And when I see the AI load up on a specific Phase, I'll play the Evade card or I try to increase my defense on that specific Weapon Module on that Phase. I always play the Heal card on Phase 3 no matter what. If I think I can annihilate the entire fleet in Phase 1, then I'll play the heal card on Phase 2 and 3.