I recently reinstalled Endless Space after clocking a lot of time when it was in the alpha stage and slightly after and I remember it being hard but fair and now...damn.



The Cravers are constantly wrecking my shit no matter what faction I seem to play as, unless I rush my tech to Dreadnoughts and even then I'm only barely holding ground.



I'm getting slammed with CP 17/17 fleets of Dreads & Cruisers/Battleships (mix of Beam & Missile ships) which absolutely shred anything I throw at them. My beams and missiles are 0 - 1% effective and my kinetics are only 20% effective and anything smaller than another Dreadnought doesn't survive to melee, even then they are gutted after the fight with 10 flak & 10 shields on them + 5 or so armour mods. All my military tech is around about step 4 in terms of progression (lots of plasma tech) and my CP is 15/15, about turn 60-80 is when it all starts to go to hell, right now I am playing as Sheredyn.



Am I missing some vital step, am I just needing to power tech my military or are the Cravers just this kind of nightmare (AI factions seem to just flee them)?



/edit just to clarify, base game haven't nabbed the DLC yet.

1 of the things that stands out to me here is that you seem to be putting a LOT of armor mods (which are really really heavy) on these things. I find that if I focus more on offense and dishing out damage then it works out better for me. Since you're playing in the base game then I'd recommend lots of lasers, (until they start to counter that, and then you can either do MORE lasers, or a mix of weapons). I've had good results from doing massed lasers with some flak defense and minimal other defenses. The armor mods you were putting in there are really heavy, and even though it seems like that is the best way to go about your goal of having your ships survive, I find that the best way to defend against some evil little Cravers ship, is if the evil little Cravers ship isn't there any more.



Common ship layout:

70% of weight spent on 1 weapon

20% of weight spent on defenses (mostly flak)

10% on special mods and stuff



Also (nab the dlc, one of the things it does very well is change the combat system and allow you to have any of the weapons focused on long, medium, or melee range. I'm a big fan of decimating the enemy from a longer range so that fewer ships are hitting me if they do live to melee range)

It seems that you might have to redesign your fleets, Mirasiel.



In the most recent patches of the game, there are battle formations which allow one to use specialized ships, such as defensive ones, carriers and nukers. That is what I commonly do in my fleets, so that my tanky ships can hold the enemy attacks while my fighters and nukers focus in destroying the enemy.

Thanks for the replies.



I have redesigned my fleets around "offensive is the best defense" and that seems to be working a bit better.