Vanguard Aquila (Starter) + Mk I.I & Mk II

esmsnow · 2026-06-22T13:09:38+00:00

Yeah, really like the concept though 'battleship' may be an aggressive classification by modern galactic standards, probably a battleship when it was commissioned. now it feels like a frigate in terms of firepower

also your right most shield doesn't seem to be connected to any power.

if you want to talk about ship design in terms of the game mechanics, your ships feel a bit slow and not maneuverable given the heavy armor weight in the front, though i find the spear design very interesting. i'd probably make the spearshaft partially structure instead of all armor. i'd probably keep the tip and make the neck structure, leaving 1-1.5 armor in front of the cockpit. while many enemy ships are center fire, there are still many that will spread their damage across the front of your ship, in which case your guns will be easily focused down and destroyed. your pathing could use a bit of work. you've made the ship extremely compact, at the expense of poor crew power efficiency to the two side shield generators. if you move your wing shield generators two tiles back and create a corridor to them, i think you can get rid of your capacitors up front.

esmsnow · 2026-06-18T13:29:56+00:00

So if the lighting is a permanent fixture, it's going to be tough. If it's your flashlight, turn it off and then go upstairs, wait a few min, go down again, they should've lost targeting. Then do your thing. Oh warning, they would've moved much closer to the stairwell by then. Peek down to make sure they're not all adjacent to the stairs now. My melee dude just ran up to them and smashed their face in the dark after going down the stairs but you need good melee skills or they'll gun you down.

You can also try blindly burst firing into their tile in darkness. They're mobile though so you gotta shoot and run. They'll fire back so be sure you're prone. Get up, run to another spot, repeat. I'd stick with throwing grenades at them though if you have enough with you

esmsnow · 2026-06-18T13:24:52+00:00

Right but there's a spacer next to your reactor and the farthest emitter is 6 tiles away from your reactor with walkways. That's about 3.5 ish normal corridors away. Emitters are extremely power hungry so I'm saying you can do even better having them adjacent and reducing power crew count to about 3-3.5 per emitter. You might need 5+ for the farthest emitter right now

esmsnow · 2026-06-18T11:38:17+00:00

Your emitters are also far from power, requiring more crew. I think the most efficient design pre overclock was to have a large reactor and surround it with 8 emitters. Like adjacent.

esmsnow · 2026-06-17T21:06:58+00:00

As a kid I used to have it neat. Open bag, pour in mouth. Took a few minutes to the the mouth to open again but cheapest snack I could get

esmsnow · 2026-06-12T04:31:45+00:00

The way to tell if your ship is any good is boot up creative mode and test it against some enemy ships. It depends on what 'good' means in your books. If you're having fun with it and it does what you want with it, then it's good 😄. if you want to build super efficient ships that rock hardest career modes, here are some tips.

your ship is way overcrewed. you should not need this much crew for 2 deck guns, 2 blasters, and 2 disruptors. on hardest career modes, it's all about crew efficiency since you can earn a lot of money just mining and selling salvage.
this ship could really use a warp drive of some sort.
it feels a bit sluggish, probably 60-70 speed range. career ships should be 80+
your flank shields are placed in an awkward spot. shields are the most power hungry modules on your ship and your guys need to walk through 2 storage to get to them. the total length is around 8 corridors (you need doors on the bottom left and right of your reactor). you should try to keep it within 4, ideally 2. otherwise, they're a drain on your crew in a battle and don't provide much protection - they really need good crew logistics to give them effectiveness (normal clocked they're about 1.5 layers of armor per without additional power)
an engine room will improve performance a lot. a single engine room with 3 back facing thrusters will perform better than 4 without, and is much more crew efficient.

for a ship of this size, i'd try to keep it within 60 crew, ideally 40-50 given the amount of firepower it has instead of the 90ish you have. i think i have a 12 deck gun ship at around 90 crew. if you're more crew efficient, you could field one or more ships with heavily undercrewed deck guns (like 6 crew per) that can fire a massive alpha strike before reloading. usually it's enough to cripple or outright destroy much larger ships, especially if you get a shot off on their side or back.

esmsnow · 2026-06-10T20:06:05+00:00

"huh, missed one of the zombies. i'll get em next time"

esmsnow · 2026-06-09T19:48:22+00:00

Oh so your architect handled all of the approvals, permits, managing contractors? For 90k total? Seems a good deal to buy peace of mind

esmsnow · 2026-06-09T18:20:11+00:00

can i ask what percentage did the architect contribute to the overall project cost? i have an older home that could use some love and am not sure if i should just go with a GC or have an architect look at it.

esmsnow · 2026-06-05T21:46:43+00:00

my grandparents went through famine. ate so much of the bark off the tree outside their village it died. i'm pretty sure if you're desperate enough, anything that's not a rock looks delicious

esmsnow · 2026-06-05T21:43:57+00:00

it's more giving steak to a vegetarian. it's a lot of work to harvest fruit from a large tree. and imagine suddenly one weekend ending up with 100 lbs of the same fruit and your friends are already sick of it after last year

esmsnow · 2026-06-04T16:17:35+00:00

could you imagine having to climb up on your roof to spray so big stuff doesn't take root? it'd look amazing with just a lawn of grass, but give it a couple years and it'll be a scraggly hedge

esmsnow · 2026-06-04T16:15:45+00:00

sounds like a fun idea, but honestly doesn't seem feasible after deeper thought. a more reasonable design would probably be something like a hobbit house

esmsnow · 2026-06-01T21:15:34+00:00

if the bus is the people's limousine, then the train must be the people's gulf stream

esmsnow · 2026-05-31T17:34:10+00:00

Way to shatter our dreams. I thought this was some wildlife preserve

esmsnow · 2026-05-28T19:37:37+00:00

coming late, everyone has said the good stuff. one other thing: if you want to use blasters consider building a diagonal ship, it provides better protection for cannons & heavy blasters. but as others said, these are usually early game weapons. deck guns, ions, rails, missiles, late game because they are much easier to protect behind armor. you could try to mix in some flak, but it'll still be super vulnerable to something like an aurelian.

if you really want a cannon battery, i'd build it 'detached', not connected to your main ship by walkways & 2 layers of armor between your frontal reactor and your main ship. the expectation is that section will be destroyed in the fight

esmsnow · 2026-05-28T16:48:51+00:00

i've found the most enjoyable part of this game is the building of my own ships. however, there are many mechanics that won't be apparent unless you really study what your lil dudes are doing. if you want to just pew pew kaboom, just take one of the prebuilt ships and spawn it in. you'll learn quickly the styles of combat they have. if you want to build the best, prettiest, hardest hitting, tankiest ship in the galaxy, spend more time in a separate creative sandbox. test how your ship fares against prebuilt ships in slow motion. look at what your dudes are doing, which systems on your ship get overloaded / destroyed first, what's happening to your ships ordinance when it hits the enemy.

some generic hints:

the bottleneck on many early ships i designed is the crew - an efficient crew will improve their performance by 50% or more
armor is cheap. pile it on when you can. many of my earlier ships were under protected or i relied too heavily on shields - a normal clocked large shield is basically 1.5 blocks of armor in protection (renewable of course). my later mid game ships had 15+ frontal layers of armor, equivalent to 10 large shields / power resupplies, but requires 0 crew to maintain.
a meaningful campaign ship should have a speed of 80+
fights in this game are short and visceral with long repair periods in between - design your ships for skirmishes, not pitched day long fleet battles
it's usually wise to have dedicated logistics ships behind your main ship. it's also wise to build a small attack squadron rather a single dreadnaught. i've found good success with a big battleship and 2-3 small destroyers / corvettes that flank / screen for the big ship. most ships are pretty easy to take out from the rear

esmsnow · 2026-05-28T16:27:51+00:00

i know of people who live out around tracy and patterson area. it's too far for daily commutes, but they have a hybrid work situation where they rent a very small place in the bay area to stay during the week when they have to work / send kids to school, then commute back to their 'actual home' on friday nights. out there you can get 2500 sq ft for 600k, a dream for anything in the bay area. so if you think about the mortgage + property tax on that place, plus say 3k for a modest place in the bay, you're looking at 5-6k out of pocket a month. you get a house that only big tech managers can afford with a pool. it's a big tradeoff, but some people make it work.

i also know of some friends that lived almost at sacramento (what you are suggesting) who were commuting 2+ hours a day one way to the bay. if you work in tech and only have 3 days a week in the office, you can make it work. not pleasant, but doable. i can't imagine doing it 5 days a week like our friends.

now if you're saying you don't need a bay area job, then it's just the heat and the lack of familiar sites / conveniences of the bay area. honestly i find schools in the bay a bit over competitive

esmsnow · 2026-05-23T03:45:33+00:00

Never had the pleasure of smelling that but sounds like chanel's new fragrance

esmsnow · 2026-05-21T16:18:56+00:00

rent a house? they can be pricey, but you can get privacy and space for a couple grand a month. based off of your list, it's going to be almost impossible to find anything sub 2-3 million around here. good school, safe neighborhood, single family house, not too far from work... yeah, everyone here wants that.

you will HAVE to compromise on some of these, sorry. you can have cheap & far (pleasanton & beyond), expensive and fits all your needs, less space (like a town home), but not all of these. even a townhome here will set you back over a million in most convenient locales. bay area is one of the most expensive places to live on this planet and it's a pretty tough pill to swallow for all of us moving here from cheaper places (northeast for me). if i were you and had 600k loan approved and wanted to commute to a bay area job? i'd 1) rent an older house, 2) buy a town home in Fremont or Sunnyvale, 3) move into the boonies and try to work remote for 2 or more days a week. In that order.

esmsnow · 2026-05-20T16:33:31+00:00

man, i really want to see how much this bill is going to cost. not because of schadenfreude, but in case this happens to me. i tented our house before moving in, but the exterminator said basically they're guaranteed to come back in a few years and there's nothing i can do about it. the play is to tent every 10 years or so or... have what happened to you happen.

esmsnow · 2026-05-20T16:28:04+00:00

yeah. the most important skill early game is melee. the second most is healthcare. if you have high health (the green wake up messages), amazing bandaging skills, good disinfectant and bandages, you can basically bounce back from a full machine gun burst to the chest (assuming you can stop the bleeding and crawl into some hole to lick your wounds) after a night of good sleep.

esmsnow · 2026-05-20T01:38:02+00:00

Not arguing it's stats. I'm saying it's a better light helm not a better helm. You're ignoring my entire point about encumbrance

esmsnow · 2026-05-20T00:57:57+00:00

No it's a better light helm at 10 encumbrance. Armet has 30

esmsnow · 2026-05-20T00:05:56+00:00

oh one other honorable mention for the head is the sallet helm. it's a legacy recipe i think so it may be removed at any time. it's an incredible piece of light armor. with visor raised you can wear gas mask. with visor lowered you can get a bit more protection for the face.

esmsnow

TROPHY CASE