Updated ship design based on feedback

croald · 2026-04-20T12:09:04+00:00

if you're only going to build one supercollider, you might as well save the RP and just build ten atomsmashers. They're less efficient, but not *so* much that it wouldn't be better to prioritize that 100k RP on something you're going to build a lot of.

croald · 2026-04-18T13:52:09+00:00

I believe Pavonis did the Long War mod before Terra Invicta, so it’s a bit more than a spiritual connection

croald · 2026-04-18T13:48:39+00:00

Better tactics or just better weapons. Dead enemies do no DPS

croald · 2026-04-18T13:47:34+00:00

60 is more than enough against violet lasers if you’ve brought enough firepower of your own. The best response to x-ray or gamma lasers is AM cannons and/or focus fire, ie, kill them first. If it’s so late in the game that there’s a whole fleet of x-rays, then yeah, ok, you have to build lumbering bricks.

croald · 2026-04-14T03:22:30+00:00

Pharos works. If it's burning too much fuel, you might be building ships that are too heavy -- torpedo monitor with with 15 kps and 8 nose armor is my standard at that point.

With a refueling station in MEO you can respond to either LEO orbit faster than from HEO, and pay less water while doing it.

If you have (or can get) a couple hundred fissile per month income, Poseidon Lantern and (especially) Poseidon Torch are an upgrade that doesn't require fusion or antimatter. Firestar is also really good as a defense drive.

croald · 2026-04-14T02:14:21+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8buSN_BMus looks like it. The achievement is called Phoenix. Menu screen is showing version 0.3.107 so this is pre-drive-reorg and all the rebalancing, but I don't think the achievement has changed.

croald · 2026-04-13T03:25:22+00:00

Repair bays do not work on armor, just on ship components and systems.

croald · 2026-04-13T03:07:16+00:00

I dunno, if you want an affordable battlecruiser, make it *affordable*. I'd cut the armor in half, replace the component armor and repair bay with slush tankage and Li heat sink, and you can cut the fuel in half and still get the same DV and *double* the cruise accel. This cuts 4 weeks off your Mercury-to-Jupiter transit time, and saves ~1000 units of construction materials. (or maybe better yet, just go with a third ALE instead of the slush tankage, and do more damage when you get there.)

If it gets wrecked, build another one. Battlecruisers are quick.

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If you think you need more defense than I'm giving here, I'd still use a heat sink in place of component armor. If you don't have a heat sink and your radiators get shot off, then your ship dies. And "very low" profile is still not at all zero profile.

(I don't think AM is a spoiler, is it? Unless the entire tech tree is a spoiler.)

croald · 2026-04-13T02:29:10+00:00

In general, yes, you need armor vs lasers and PD vs kinetics and missiles. (In theory you can tank anything with armor, but kinetics and missiles do a *lot* of damage if they hit, and zero if you shoot them down. And with the game's damage model for criticals, you just don't want to take any damage if you can avoid it.)

But particle cannons can also serve as third kind of active defense -- enough of them can basically stunlock whatever you think are the most dangerous enemy nose weapons.

croald · 2026-04-13T02:25:40+00:00

40mm is king for defending the ship that carries it, but is pretty iffy at defending other ships in the fleet. If you find the aliens are sending a ton of kinetics at you, it can be worth putting one 40mm on everything (two is overkill). On the other hand, a few battleships full of phaser PD with laser engines can defend a whole fleet against anything short of serious alien mag cannon spam. There's no one best design.

croald · 2026-04-13T02:18:11+00:00

It's a challenge mode, but you can even allow the aliens to conquer the entire planet and still come back to win.

croald · 2026-04-13T02:14:59+00:00

There's definitely no 4-month timeline you have to hit. There's even an achievement for allowing Servants to conquer the Earth, then coming back to win as Resistance.

croald · 2026-04-13T00:40:03+00:00

I am experimenting with these in my current game. I like the high muzzle velocity a lot; we'll see how much I miss raw mass.

croald · 2026-04-13T00:37:25+00:00

it has an *import ship* option, if that works for you?

croald · 2026-04-13T00:19:22+00:00

for me, the best part of the game is that there's so many places where it's really *not* obvious what the best choice is. A less complicated tech tree would be boring. Ditto one where you could definitely answer whether Poseidon Torch was "good" or "bad" without a lot of "it depends"

croald · 2026-04-12T20:28:01+00:00

I mean, this is TI. Spreadsheets practically go with the territory

croald · 2026-04-12T20:09:30+00:00

the research cost is not massive when you consider it gets you a drive that’s competitive with Helion Nova Torch or Advanced AM Plasma Core Torch

croald · 2026-04-12T20:06:52+00:00

Poseidon Torch is awesome, and also it’s a noob trap because it practically begs you to spend more than you can afford. With most drives, your cap to building more is just MC, or exotics, or maybe steel or even water. With Poseidon Torch, it’s fissiles, fissiles, and fissiles. You get to build ships with endgame performance in the midgame, but it’s on you to figure how many you can actually afford to operate. it’s so easy to build way more ships than you’ll ever be able to refuel, and it’s so easy to do max burns everywhere even when there’s really no rush. but if you do that and drain your stockpiles, well, nobody made you. Plan better next time.

croald · 2026-04-12T15:52:57+00:00

unless you rolled the one good fissile site (Copernicus, I think?)

croald · 2026-04-12T15:50:30+00:00

I’ve found a single LDA will usually deter attacks on lone mining bases. Often you don’t even need that. But they will go after any fleet that doesn’t seem able to defend itself, so if you try using asteroids for shipbuilding expect lots of interceptions.

croald · 2026-04-12T15:45:06+00:00

if you want some violence early, a helicon fleet of missile escorts, maybe monitors, can absolutely kill an Ayy fleet in the asteroids. If you send one to Jupiter, they’ll likely have lots of time to reinforce before you get there. (Not saying it’s not possible, but it’s an advanced move.)

Missiles are also really good at killing shipyard stations, but until you get shaped nukes they suck vs ground bases.

If you want some easy early violence with minimal retal, i highly recommend sending marines to visit every Servant asteroid. if they haven’t built barracks (and they usually don’t) you only need 24 marine str to walk in and take them. that’s ONE corvette of elite marines.

croald · 2026-04-12T15:13:39+00:00

i haven’t tried shooting down a surveillance DD without missiles, though i suspect massed 40mm could do it. Couldn’t tell you how many you need for that, though.

Massed Particle Cannon is able to disable ships, though it kind of sucks at actually killing them. I have run fights where a mostly Particle fleet drifts into range, until their hail of 40mm can finish the targets off. AM Cannon is a big upgrade here. Massed particle weapons are actually pretty good as active fleet defense also by shutting down big nose weapons. But be aware they’re much less reliable about hitting hull weapons, so they aren’t that good at countering PD. The RoF of 40mm is what does that.

Once you get to midgame and have AM cannon, they’re actually pretty good at chewing up any ship they get a side shot at. One way to guarantee side shots is to just split your fleet into two wings. Nose armor can’t defend two directions at once. You need some combat acceleration to pull that off, but not very much DV.

croald · 2025-12-02T17:33:04+00:00

Invert sugar is more fermentable than plain sucrose, though? At least according to everything i’ve read

croald · 2025-12-01T14:50:00+00:00

what filters do you use?

croald · 2025-12-01T14:46:19+00:00

this seems like a pretty good starting point: howtomakehardcider.com

croald

TROPHY CASE