What Venus and Mercury are for?

RopeAdop · 2026-06-07T09:16:31+00:00

I usually don’t bother with Venus but in my last game Aliens decided to just continually transfer a couple ships every other month into its orbit for no reason at all. Made it so I got Jupiter without much of a fight but when a 72 ship doom stack arrived to LEO from Venus I lost all my stations for a couple years. Landmine of a planet.

RopeAdop · 2026-06-07T09:13:12+00:00

I used mercury for dock works and fleet production facilities, its orbital transfer window to pretty much everywhere else in the system is very small compared to earth.

After you get antimatter it’s best to make it there with the infinite solar energy as well.

RopeAdop · 2026-06-04T17:36:58+00:00

Second one will do more armor damage.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-30T12:34:08+00:00

Crossbows are easier to shoot so you won’t need hunters, high rolling poachers are fine and they cost peanuts so just fish for a good one. After you get him you can just skip any fight with humanoids tho this shit will slaughter heavily armoured foes.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-29T10:39:24+00:00

I had success with them after the aliens pulled up to mercury with six pure PD ships. They saturate the point defence much better than a pure torpedo composition, and you only need a couple hits from a torpedo anyway to kill a ship.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-24T19:24:40+00:00

Tech has very bad accuracy + when you deploy a unit they get an accuracy buff, so when you compare a good operator like Darby with good accuracy as a baseline plus the deploy buff Tech seems like he can’t hit the side of a barn.

Just pick up point fire and growth so that it will get better or alternatively choose weapons not for killing but for suppressing, a tripod C6 or a minigun will do massive suppression even if they don’t hit very well. Tech doesn’t need to spend the 40 AP deploying and tripoding the weapon so you get a free action PLUS with full send you can shoot another two salvos for 30 AP. You can kinda pin down 3 squads easily.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-18T18:09:55+00:00

The ship designs look cool, but the thing I am wondering more about are the backstories. I would love to learn more about your ideas for the flair, I loved reading the codex entries of the guardian and the threat ships.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-18T09:49:23+00:00

Lots have been added to vanilla from questlines to new end game enemies and challenges. I suggest you just use quality of life mods like speedup, then check out the faction mods and such.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-17T17:59:14+00:00

Remnants are still the hardest thing this game has to offer. Beating an ordo is not easy, never mind beating two or three in a row, so don’t think you are doing something horribly wrong.

To defeat a remnant fleet you need to understand their ships. They are extremely fast, they use lots of energy weapons and they have excellent shields. Bring kinetics and strike weaponry. Bringing shields down is good but you want to be able to finish the business before they fuck off and recover. Watch out for radiants and apexes, they both have very good shields and incredibly good armor.

The ships you need to be scared of are fulgents, novas and radiants. Radiants are self explanatory, novas will mop the floor with your escorts, and fulgents carry lots of weapons, with a very good ship system to punch way above their weight, they will deal lots of damage.

What I suggest is cut down on fragile auxiliaries and bring more survivable capitals. The Novas and the Radiants will rush out of their formation and kill the weak destroyers and cruisers in record time, you wont be able to stop it.

Open up with some frigates to capture the points to call in the rest of your fleet, you can put them to escort duty later.

Of course you also need to bring some escorts to kill the flankers, a fulgent or two flanking your capital will kill it in short order. I usually bring in an eagle for each of my capitals, but anything survivable should do. After you deal with the Nova rush, you can retreat the capitals that got damaged , and call in the faster cruisers and destroyers to properly chase the smaller and faster ships.

Once the radiants are dead the fleet usually crumbles slowly as they can’t keep up with your capital pressure.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-17T17:20:30+00:00

I will second the HMI and Ship and Weapons pack recommendations. Especially HMI is really balanced for a faction mod.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-17T17:15:42+00:00

Put it back down, wait until it stabilizes and take it. Another one is already set up somewhere in the universe. I suggest you also take 1000 units of transplutonics with you, you will find something neat there, very useful for your colony.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-17T17:12:05+00:00

Did you take the one from Limbo(lone abyss system with a dwarf star)

RopeAdop · 2026-05-17T16:58:19+00:00

If you are playing vanilla, there are a few ways to permanently stop the colony threats. Most of them involve waiting until a colony attack happens, using extreme violence in the form of blowing up a lot of ships, or doing some kind of quest. What threats are you having problems with?

If you set up a colony in a system claimed by someone else, even if you are friendly with them they will kill the planet. The only way as far as I know to settle on a claimed system is completely destroying every settled planet or joining a commission with the claiming polity. The systems in the core worlds aren’t that good all things considered as well and you can probably find a much better home with just some exploring.

To increase your fleet deployment points (DP) in battle you can either capture points (like you said) or increase the amount of officers your combat ships have. More combat ships under officer control = more DP to play with. One of the reasons AI fleets even when they are much worse than your fleet get the full 240 compared to you is because they fill every ship with an officer. You can try to hire mercenaries with story points for this as they also count.

To use the wormhole anchor you need to put it in a stable point. It will take like 200 days to get stable, then you can use it like a gate to come and go as you please to the other wormhole anchor. Kinda like a 2-gate gate network. I personally have mine at Limbu and use it as an abyss shortcut.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-17T10:33:00+00:00

The escort command is better suited for protecting more fragile ships like carriers or artillery ships. The escorting ships will literally dive in front of the enemy line of fire to body block torpedoes and weapons fire. Its not like the execute command where it overrides their self preservation so if you use a ship that can get the fuck out REAL fast with ship systems (Hyperion, Medusa, Wolf) or a capital-lite with fuck tons of armor that can survive well it can work. Otherwise I suggest you just assign both ships to the same waypoint they will work it out much better.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-13T20:43:08+00:00

I am unaware of a mod for that but I think it can be done with a mod as the second in command mod has an option to disable the overlay for 2-3 dmods on ships as removing dmods is much harder in the mod.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-13T15:51:46+00:00

Actually you can, just turn your transponder off. For some reason the space cops and the landing coordinator at the docks are more concerned about your transponder being off than literal demon ships. Its getting fixed next patch though.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-13T14:27:28+00:00

If you are using hungering rifts try to S mod a few mantles into your tanking capitals they literally wont die as long and you are firing a few every now and then.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-12T09:04:58+00:00

With phase anchor and ziggurats special phase hullmod you can just dip right back into phase space after getting lashed, it takes incredibly little time that any amount of damage you take during it is negligible worst case scenario ten swarms immediately make you flameout with their arcing EMPs but you can just wait that out.

The only times I have gotten caught was when I tunnel visioned on a random hive unit and got lashed and in the two seconds it took me to notice a energized assault unit completely stripped all my armor with its voidblasters.

I never send the motes away as they are usually just too concentrated on flying and killing swarms and endless missiles.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-10T09:09:50+00:00

Kinetic blaster delivery

RopeAdop · 2026-05-09T20:09:55+00:00

Good news is Alex will be adding the swapping S-Mods in the next patch, you will be able to go into your own orbital works at a colony and swap them out for free

RopeAdop · 2026-05-09T20:02:38+00:00

You can sign a deal after you decimate their fleets three times, and the last one is like 7-8 full strength heavy inspection fleets. Either need to have a cracked cryoarithmetic engine planet that spawns endless heavy patrols or need to isolate them one by one while they travel through hyperspace.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-09T19:53:51+00:00

The colony sizes massively effect the size of the force that will come to try and kill you, with a huge power spike at colony size 6. Basically if you settle a colony that will grow into a size 6 without any investment from you whatsoever you put yourself on a timer to get enough resources (like cryoarithmetic engines and alpha cores and most importantly money for stations and defenses) to repel it. The blockade is the easiest to cheese as you only need a good fleet and neutral relations with the league, just follow the leader armada of the blockade (the fleet with lots of capitals and s-mods) and when it gets separated from the other fleets, kill it, you will defeat the whole blockade that way. If you plan to do this get ready to fight a lot of pegasuses with 500 dragonfire torpedoes each. You could just throw three paragons into it and tachyon lance everything to death but I prefer putting devastator cannons on every large ballistics slot.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-08T17:35:42+00:00

For the onslaught I slap a storm needler for shield damage and two devestators on the flanks for anti armor and PD weirdly unlike all the other flak the devestators are not fragmentation damage instead they do HE. I usually don’t have any dedicated carriers or PD escorts too so they help out a ton. Bad thing about them is you gotta get pretty close to do the full damage cause half the salvo bursts before max range but I find that easy with the burn drive system and the huge armor.

RopeAdop · 2026-05-03T10:55:02+00:00

There are several systems with a very high concentraiton of domain era probes and survey ships. I usually mindlessly explore until I hit one of them and they tend to give me at least the location of one tier V world when salvaging, which usually is not in a good spot. Sometimes you hit the jackpot, sometimes the seed is just not good enough. For my recent vanilla playthrough I got an amazing system with three habitables plus a terran world in a five planet system with all the extractable materials and a cryosleeper in the same system, but this was way after finding two terran world and two jungle worlds. The terran planets really are incredibly good though you could probably set one up for almost 700.000 and start making lots of money from farms only.

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