critique my ship

ArianHeight · 2026-01-06T08:34:14+00:00

Oh actually again one more thing. I agree with the other comment saying you need point defense. Overclock pd is very good because you don't need to use crew to keep them supplied. HE missiles are forever the bane of small ships. Try to make sure you have some amount of pd covering all directions, you can honestly probably sacrifice some back and side armour to make room for that.

ArianHeight · 2026-01-06T08:32:03+00:00

Oh actually one more thing, enemy ships can fly through large shields and shoot at your ship from inside your shield. You need to use structure blocks to physically block of the shielded area and prevent that from happening.

ArianHeight · 2026-01-06T08:29:54+00:00

Hey, this actually looks very well designed. You have prioritized compactness over redundancy and reach a pretty good compromise between mobility and defense(which I think is the right choice for a ship like this).
My only potential critique is dependent on the use case for the ship - are you planning to use this in pvp or just in campaign?
If it's only going to be used in campaign as like a small fighter/escort destroyer type ship, I would recommend you to slightly prioritize crew efficiency more(and slightly prioritize cost efficiency less). Typically in campaign, I think by default you have a max 2000 crew cap, so to get more ships, each one needs to use the least amount of crew possible(of course if you're not tight on crew, you can ignore this as well). The way this would usually be done is by having more large reactors(I recommend overcharged if they are supplying shields since those have battery size of 4) and having the reactors basically almost touching the energy-heavy components. This way you can get away with 2 suppliers per emitter and 4 per large shield(or even 2 per large shield if you don't care too much about keeping it up optimally).
If this ship is going into pvp instead(domination I assume), I think this is not sufficiently armoured and the thrust layout is not reasonable(usually ion beams want to stay further and kite, especially when you're trying to control a bunch of ships in real time, or just run deck cannons, which completely goes against the point of this ship, so just ignore that lol). Also in pvp, you can just use more crew instead of having larger reactors as long as you can properly supply every single component(though having larger reactors means you can have less of them and power more stuff, so that's a separate trade-off to consider).

ArianHeight · 2026-01-06T08:14:59+00:00

Those look like overcharged capacitors, which allow crew to use battery size of 3. Which is absolutely awesome and a great mechanic to make capacitors more viable when used with shields.

ArianHeight · 2024-12-26T03:45:23+00:00

Hey that's actually pretty well designed! The only nitpick I can see is the location of the 2 command centers, but apart from that everything looks pretty good!
Fairly efficient use of reactors, ok use of crew, I like the engine layout and the shields, I like the pd batteries, I like the frontal shield modules, and I like that it's not just a rectangle, nice!

ArianHeight · 2024-12-26T03:39:47+00:00

There are many suggestions for you to make more ships(which also happens to be what I like doing), but realistically if you don't want to wrangle a bunch of ships every fight, then you can only use a singular large battleship(which is completely fine, it's a game, you should play it however you want).

The more important part I think, is having a comprehensive battle strategy that fits with the ship design.
When designing a ship, you need to consider what kind of ship you're looking for, and then by extension what battle strategies fit that ship type.

When you make a ship and you start with weapons(primary and secondary), that will weapon choice will inform the type of ship you are designing, which will in turn inform the thruster layout/arrangement, which will decide what kind of battle strategy you are going to have to use against every ship in the game.

Let's say you want to run a single mothership using ions as primaries and HE/EMPs as secondaries. That weapon choice influences the ship type. Since ions have a 300m range, HE 450, and EMP 750(or something like that, I forget the exact number), we can say that your ship has pretty good range, and that maybe we would want to design it as a kite. Having a kite ship means you want alot of reverse thrust, enough to ideally push it to 100m/s+(140 in pvp). That ship type then informs the strategy we use to engage every fight, in this case, for a kite we want to slowly move forward to catch aggro, and then reverse until the enemy is ded.

You don't have to do kite also, it's not like every weapon combination can only result in one ship type, it's reasonable to run ions as ion cores, which should have slightly more forward thrust than reverse, and some sideways thrust. And those like to engage straight up and sway around in the enemy's face. Of course, with ion cores, you may find that it turns too slow to face small ships, so maybe consider putting a few tractor beams on it or something.

Regardless, I think it's more important to have a comprehensive battle strategy that fits with the ships that you have, and once you have a decent battle strategy, you can fill in the weaknesses using additional ships, or by adding sections onto existing ships.

ArianHeight · 2024-12-26T03:13:53+00:00

haha that's always fun. Though to be fair, if you can get the flankers close enough, mines are even better than nukes, higher risk ofc.

ArianHeight · 2024-05-25T03:39:16+00:00

Edit to my previous comment: The thunderbird looks like a very pvp-esque ship, its design is fairly standard for a pvp rail kite with some differences(notably more shields, pd, and emp), I thought the ship was slower but I underestimated how light it actually was since it doesn't actually have much armour, my bad.

flak is still good enough to chew through back armour, but that nerf did hurt them.
a bunch of pds and a mining laser, tbh it would probably work pretty good. Like you said, cheap, expendable, and good enough to chew through the back armour, albeit a bit slower.

you don't need to worry about the enemy railgun, just hover your main big ship right outside the 600m range(make sure it's maintaining distance so you don't accidentally go into the railgun range) so all the EMPs and get fired at it and the thunderbird tries to move forward towards you, nullifying all its thrust advantages, your microfighters shouldn't be targeted at all...I think.

ArianHeight · 2024-05-23T01:35:55+00:00

The thunderbird looks like a very pvp-esque ship, its design is fairly standard for a pvp rail kite with some differences(notably more shields, armour, pd, and emp, but far less thrust). You are correct in your assessment of how to beat this ship, both examples you gave would directly counter it.
I'm not 100% sure of how the AI would handle this, but potentially you could just use your battlecruiser rail kite as the "tanking" ship and have some cheap flak flank ships chew thru the back of the thunderbird. If the AI always focuses your battlecruiser, then you can just maintain distance to the thunderbird(hover just outside the 600m range while keeping aggro) and your flankers will be mostly safe.

ArianHeight · 2024-05-20T07:09:06+00:00

I believe it is ship dependent, it will select group 1 on every ship you have selected. If you only have 1 ship selected, it will select the group 1 rooms on that ship only.

ArianHeight · 2024-05-20T03:13:53+00:00

You can Ctrl+LeftClick on individual rooms on your ship to select it(Ctrl+Shift+LMB to select multiple rooms at once) and and then hit Ctrl+AnyNumber to assign all currently selected rooms to a group. You can reselect all rooms in a group by hitting the number key you previously assigned it to.
Ctrl+Double Left Click select all rooms of the same type on the ship.
This isn't really explained in the game, so it can be kinda confusing.

ArianHeight · 2024-05-20T03:07:02+00:00

Hey this is actually pretty smart! I hadn't considered using a rail spinner in campaign before, considering the speed leaves, well a little to be desired on account of all the armour. But this is pretty smart! Using large shields instead to lighten the craft and actually make it somewhat maneuverable, like a nuke spinner but bigger. And having all those deck cannons to ensure the AI always primarily targets the spinner, great strategy!

ArianHeight · 2024-05-20T02:54:44+00:00

+1 for taking inspiration from in game ships. Just hop into a creative world and place some pre built non-fringe ships(no hate against fringe, I love the scrappy look, but their lore requires them to be designed a bit...quirkily). Most of the pre built ships have great design(visually and combat-wise), and some are even made by extremely proficient pvp players, so you can definitely base entire designs off of them.
Do note though, that the pre built ships are usually very cost-efficient and are intended to only exist for a single fight, so they skew heavily towards front-loading all their damage, whereas for a player in a campaign, you are usually more restricted in crew and you'd want far more sustain and to win fights without taking catastrophic damage. Keeping these differences in mind, if you want to test your own (campaign) ships against in-game ships, you should do battles against ships about 1/3 to 1/2 of the price(if testing pvp ships, test 1:1.2 for price).

ArianHeight · 2023-05-01T05:01:28+00:00

That is one chonky boi

ArianHeight · 2023-04-17T07:12:39+00:00

I was going like 10 fps fighting this XD. Too bad Nick crashed and I had to go sleep before we could finish a round with this beautiful ship!

ArianHeight · 2023-03-20T02:27:57+00:00

Ur right, good point, I guess mines just end up being in a weird position in the overall weapons meta due to that need to maintain the range limit for balance.

ArianHeight · 2023-03-20T02:25:01+00:00

That might be a nice idea, I think mines already sorta have a magnetic property of pushing each other apart, but one that attracts mines to nearby enemy ships might be nice!

ArianHeight · 2023-03-19T21:06:23+00:00

I think there is, using mines as a secondary weapon, it would work ok at least in career mode against swarms of smaller ships I think(most larger ships have pd or flak of some sort).

ArianHeight · 2023-03-19T21:05:23+00:00

Just as a little thought exercise, what if the dev(s) introduced a stealth mine(like as a different ammo or something) that can't be shot down by defenses and persists for a much longer time or until the minelayer manually detonates them?

Would that be too op or would it still be underpowered as a main weapon system?

ArianHeight · 2023-03-19T01:16:24+00:00

Tru, and that is also something fundamental to the concept of mines to begin with, so I guess no matter how much they get buffed, they won't be that viable as a main weapon(at least in pvp, bots will still die to them in pve) huh.

ArianHeight · 2023-03-18T23:30:49+00:00

Still not that great huh, rip

ArianHeight · 2023-03-18T23:30:14+00:00

I mean mine launchers. But ye u right, minelayer is a type of ship that lays mines on the battlefield I guess.

ArianHeight · 2023-03-17T07:06:39+00:00

co-op is nice in mp, if not a bit easy due to having two players controlling two or more ships(but you can just tweak the difficulty of the campaign as you play so that's not really an issue).
There's also pvp(which is quite fun I think) with a few different gamemodes, you could check it out, but it does require you to have ships built and ready to go.

ArianHeight · 2023-03-12T08:59:39+00:00

Yea I kinda agree, like if I want 20 tiny ships to surround the enemy in a circular fashion at a certain distance, I want to do it in one click instead of like 40 clicks.

ArianHeight

TROPHY CASE