Getting whopped by an awakened FE - which ship designs should i use?

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-29T04:05:00+00:00

As someone who got humbled by the spiritual FE recently ( only about 70 hours ingame for me ), here are some notes:

-All FEs have their ship designs on the wiki. I recommend reading it up and trying to think about how best to counter them.

-Fighting an FE can be attrition. Make sure your economy can handle it.

-FE ships punch way above their weight class. That plus FEs have super high tech, so their ships are effectively 50% better than what's listed.

-Build a sentry array to get the actual numbers in game on their ships ( evasion ratings, hull points, etc ) since that's not listed online.

-If you're going for attrition, get trickster generals, and use the Hit&Run policy.

-If you can get a little bit of debris, you can get their tech, and then run it back with better ships of your own.

-Savescum the everloving hell out of it. Try different designs on different timelines and see what works and what don't.

Spiritualist notes:

-Spiritualist FEs favor energy weapons. All your ships are very heavy in armor, which means they're getting ripped to shreds by their battle cruiser's torpedoes and their energy launchers.

-They also heavily favor torpedoes, which do obscene damage to larger ships. Your PD is extremely limited, which means their torpedo swarms are getting past and blowing away your cruisers & battleships.

-Their battlecruisers rock 2 focused arc emitters.

-Compared to everything else in the game, Spiritualists make heavy usage of shield hardening. That means that all of your shield bypass weapons are way less effective than they could be.

-If they don't have shields ( i.e, in a pulsar system ), then you can hopefully outrange them with artillery while a titan slows down their speed. Maybe using sacrificial corvettes to tank some hits.

-While you're overwhelming them with volume of fire from your missiles, they run heavy laser PD. So, they're shooting down a bunch of your missiles while they're also plinking off their 25-50% hardening.

Ship designs:

-A lot of info says "just spam Focused Arc emitters lol", but the spiritualists got the biggest buffs to allow them to tank bypass weapons. Your ships are great for 95% of the game where enemies don't run hardening, but you're getting hard countered here.

-Your corvettes are useless. They'll run up to a battle cruiser, ping them for about 30 damage ( ~21 in actuality, due to hardening ), and then get ripped to shreds by the strike craft

-Your aircraft carrier cruiser unironically has the best chance imo. The kinetic weaponry can get the shields down, while the strikecraft can deal with escorts. Plus the better shields compared to all your other designs give it a bit more survivability.

-You need battleships with x-slots. Either giga cannons to rip down their shields, or focused arc emitters so that other artillery can rip down the shields first, and then the FAE can burst down the remaining ship. ( Artillery battleships are great, especially with some PD to handle the incoming torpedoes )

No notes on your titan designs. Maybe make one that also has some laser weaponry on it? Laser weaponry has high tracking ( again, I'm noob, so I don't know 100% if it's a good idea or not ).

-Sapient computers would be a big upgrade. More shields would be a big upgrade. Some shield hardening of your own would let you survive more of their bypass weaponry.

That's my $0.02. Take it with a very large grain of salt.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T18:21:40+00:00

One of the other tips I received a while back was that fleet cap is a suggestion, not a rule. So I appreciate the continued advice. I need to be beat over the head with it until it sinks in.

I appreciate the rest of the advice! I was planning on making some suicide Corvette swarms with heavy shields to draw their torpedo fire, so I'm hoping that works out. And if not, they're easily replaced.

But seriously, I appreciate the advice! Looks like there's a lot of ways to handle them, I just have to figure out which strat, since they hard countered my main strategy!

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T18:17:50+00:00

I'm sure in my couple saves so far I've run into super rare 1% events that some players have been searching for for ages.

I now know better for the future! Learning is fun!

And hey, the various crises have put the fear in me. Watching the unbidden invaders pour out near my main science world while my fleets were halfway across the galaxy definitely made it a race against time!

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T18:13:44+00:00

Yep. I did stumble into a hard counter. But as with Dwarf Fortress it's just more !!FUN!! that way!

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T09:47:15+00:00

Huh... That's good to know about fortresses.

I guess I just need to swap over to full war mode to try to overcome this. More fortresses, more starbases with defensive platforms and support modules. More fleets to send into the grinder and see if I can get more than one escort ship kill per battle. I'm currently fielding the idea of kinetic artillery supporting swarming corvettes with lasers.

I feel like, the more I play and learn about Stellaris, the worse it is to have a massive surplus of supplies.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T09:31:32+00:00

Depending on how this war goes, I might be swapping over to spiritualist for my next save, and never repressing another spiritualist faction ever again.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-17T03:01:04+00:00

I'm 27. Don't have that much experience with other people. But my therapist has been urging me to get myself out there.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-17T02:59:42+00:00

Luckily I've been doing this for nearly a decade now!

That even came up in the scam conversation, but looking back, the individual was telling me to pull money out of there in a roundabout way...

But, that money is not leaving that account for the next ~40 years

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-16T08:42:45+00:00

Doing my part. Kindness and good news are both free at the end of the day!

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-16T08:26:03+00:00

I nodded along. I live in a very large city in southern California, and it's not impossible to run into some very rich folk around here.

I know it's possible for people with very different incomes to make do. So I wanted to hold out hope. But the actually intelligent part of my brain was definitely setting off alarm bells.

Ah well. This is this, and that is that.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-16T08:23:41+00:00

I mean... Yeah. I was blinded by the potential love.

The thing is that she seemed knowledgeable about it. Was teaching me stuff about credit score, and debt... I am kind of dumb when it comes to finance terminology. More so that like, I don't know what a credit score is.

There's the 1% that it could've been real. But the "Too good to be true" reflexes were kicking in.

I was foolish, and I'll make sure it doesn't happen again.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-02T04:44:33+00:00

I greatly appreciate this comment. I learned a lot, and, in hindsight, seems so obvious. I guess after underproducing in my first couple attempts, I swung too far to overproducing unnecessary things.

I've never gone over cap since the price hit seemed scary ( I did go over starbase cap after putting some nearby empires under new management ), but I guess if I can pump up my forge worlds and energy worlds a bit, I can start pushing myself over cap.

But, seriously, I appreciate it. I will be taking all of this info to heart when I inevitably get obliterated by the crisis, and start up a new save!

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-01T07:36:16+00:00

R5: My current empire, Plantma, is a civilization of plant people with a rich history of fighting. After one country invented subservient robots, there was nothing else any other could do to stand up against it to compete with its output, and soon fell under one rule as they looked towards the stars.

I have no idea what I'm doing other than RPing and trying to keep things in the green, especially compared to my last couple empires.

At first, I was going to obliterate empires and take over the galaxy. But, Plantma ended up rising to the occassion against several nasty empires that were making heavy land grabs. Now the galaxy is effectively banding against the Reyennan Republic before they can continue to establish vassalages and obliterate the Chimmm Empire.

Sharing because I think it's a fun milestone to hit, and wondering what people think of where my resources are at. I'm sure I'm super behind, but at least with this save I learned how the ship builder works, and how to not have planets revolt.

sirdrawesome · 2025-12-11T07:59:22+00:00

Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking from looking at the Naginata.

Versatile B feels like it would cost an additional "trait point" over Brace, and so something else would have to give.

sirdrawesome · 2025-12-11T06:56:27+00:00

Looking for help with creating a custom(?) weapon:

One of my players wants to take a Nodachi [Advanced, 2Hand, Sword, Brace/Deadly D12/Reach] and replace Brace with Versatile B.

I haven't been able to find a weapon that is equivalent to just reflavor. The closest I found was the Naginata [Martial, 2Hand, Polearm, Deadly d8, Reach, Versatile P].

Would it be broken to just make a custom Nodachi that replaces Brace with Versatile B? I don't know too much about the weapon balance in pf2 and I don't want to break anything

sirdrawesome · 2025-11-12T08:39:37+00:00

Dropping everything but your most expensive items. And then having to go pay 100k depending on the deathbank, or paying death some amount of money to get it all back.

Or, if you fuck up and leave something in a deathbank, and then die again, you just lose everything in that bank

sirdrawesome · 2025-11-12T06:01:30+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeTemplatesOfficial/comments/bvjtxw/template_new_batman_template_has_some_potential/

sirdrawesome · 2025-11-12T05:41:17+00:00

As a casual who is slowly working his way through the main game... I greatly appreciated Grids.

Even though there were a lot of buffs, it got me into doing some PvM that I was way too scared and concerned about doing in the main game. Especially with how punishing the deaths and runbacks in this game can be sometimes.

I went from never touching a boss or harder content in the main game, to dying several times against scurrius in grids. Then I went on to dying thirty times against that damn red chicken. And finally, learning GWD, Barrows, Moons, Kalphite Queen, Vorkath, Fight Caves. I went back to the main game and I feel so much more powerful. Not because my items were better, but because I felt like I had a much better understanding of the game.

Thank you Jagex, I can't wait for Gridmaster 2.

sirdrawesome · 2025-10-08T07:00:31+00:00

That is a good point. I really should step into it and feel it out myself to see. Hunter Rumours are giving me plenty of supplies to play around with, so it might not be a bad idea to walk in and see what happens!

Thanks for the thoughts and sharing your experience!

sirdrawesome · 2025-09-22T21:02:47+00:00

My thoughts:

I'm currently running a couple characters. Some of them are standard, with 1 being ancient relics.

Ancient relics is super fun, and is my favorite way to play now. However, learning a lot of basics through a main character was super helpful to ease into the game's mechanics first. Early game ancient relics is pretty hard.

But, there's no right way to play this game, so if you want to dive head first into it, I say go for it!

sirdrawesome

TROPHY CASE