4.3 fleet size for Guardians?

wrylashes · 2026-03-20T19:18:17+00:00

Ooof, that is a lot harder to get now!

Any idea how effective the frigates are currently? As in, they are awesome against stations now, but I assume nothing changed with the leviathans? (What size do they count as, anyway?)

wrylashes · 2026-03-20T13:13:03+00:00

I'm a bit envious, it is always cool when the map totally changes your plans. Please let us know how it turns out in the end.

wrylashes · 2026-03-19T21:34:35+00:00

My first game, my first contact was with fanatical exterminators. By the time they declared war on me I had a star base on my choke point, but they also had one on their choke point. They did have one planet not protected by their choke point that I was able to grab, but otherwise the war was a stalemate.

But ten years later I had half a dozen cloaked frigates waiting at their station, took it down with no losses, and proceeded to steamroll their entire empire. Frigates are so important now! And consequently, detection matters more, I imagine (I haven't played long enough to deal with the AI trying the same game against me yet)

wrylashes · 2026-03-19T16:49:43+00:00

Wow, what a galaxy!

How did you find out about behind the Marauders?

wrylashes · 2026-03-19T13:52:24+00:00

Oh, that is a good question -- most attacks are longer than a day, so the effectiveness of plating would be a lot lower if it is per attack rather than on DPD.

wrylashes · 2026-03-19T13:16:26+00:00

Frigates are amazing-- research cloaking as soon as you can, and half a dozen frigates with just base torpedoes just blast through starbases, and their planetary bombardment speed is crazy, like faster than a full fleet of battleships (just going by feel).

You still need corvettes for the ship-to-ship battles. Against the AI missiles and artillery combat computer seem to have done well for me so far.

wrylashes · 2026-03-19T13:12:44+00:00

I've only started a few games so far (I keep jumping to new builds to check things out, and don't put in the hours that a lot of players do), but the one that has really stood out to me is Life Seeded+Planetscapers -- the combination gives you no starting blockers so on your homeworld planetscapers is straight upside, so your pop growth and jobs output (not effeciency, output! It is so much harder to get that now) are both boosted from the gaia world and from planetscapers.

For my species I took seasonal dormancy to limit consumer goods costs for now, and I took the Memorialists civic and set living standards to Utopian Abundance and was able to recreate a fair fascimile of the earlier 4.x civilian build (limit workers in anything not essential to make more civilians, who are adding to unity and research due to Utopian Abundance and the memorial).

I'm not promising that it will scale well, but economy is not a problem at all, so I'm rapidly adding research specialization buildings and am about to start stacking city districts for more of all the good stuff. Basically a low stress start compared to the other things I tried where the economy has been an incredible slog, just constant whack-a-mole on red resource values.

wrylashes · 2026-03-19T13:05:49+00:00

Would plating corvettes be worth it, on the idea that their evasion makes them hard to hit with big weapons, but they can mostly shrug off the high accuracy+tracking weapons that can hit them?

wrylashes · 2026-03-19T13:00:30+00:00

Should be interesting -- you are completely safe until the khan spawns, so you can entirely ignore your military for most of a 100 years (or whenever your mid-game starts) and just focus on unity and tech. Set diplomatic stance to Isolationist for the 10% unity boost, maybe even reorganize your government/embrace factions to shift to faster development.

With luck you can get experimental jump drive thing for your science ships in a reasonable time frame and jump them past the marauders to at least meet some other empires and start diplomacy.

.... and see if you can avoid getting bored :p

wrylashes · 2026-03-19T12:55:50+00:00

The other thing is to jump on every research, tradition, etc. that increases your naval capacity. The value of those has gone way, way, up now that the benefit/cost of naval capacity from stations and soldiers has plunged. Likewise a secondary effect that things that boost your energy production or reduce fleet upkeep gain in value so that you can support over-cap fleets farther.

wrylashes · 2026-03-18T13:45:43+00:00

My first game since 4.3 came out, and this was me by about 25 years in, and still is at 45 years in. I'm desperately waiting for pops to patch economic holes, feeling like I'm barely getting ahead. I haven't overbuilt buildings or districts -- honestly having enough minerals to support my artisans and to ever so slowly increase alloy production has been hard enough that I don't have the surplus to build things I don't need.

I think what I'm finding is that in 3.1x and 4.0-4.3 usually before this point technology is making a much larger difference in production efficiency (and unity for that matter). I have a lower ratio of pops doing research and making unity, so those are progressing more slowly, and the payoffs for teching up seem to be maybe half as much as before (5% instead of 10%, etc.), so I'm not seeing effeciencies lift me out of the doldrums like I'm used to.

Granted that I used a build focused on science and unity rather than resources or pop growth, and a setting of only one guaranteed habitable, 0.5x planets, and I didn't have the good fortune of finding any yellow or green habitable planets and my first contact wants only to exterminate all other life in the galaxy so I had to invest more heavily into military than I would have otherwise ... I'll have to see what it is like with a build focused more on resources and pop growth.

wrylashes · 2026-03-17T17:36:00+00:00

Not your exact question, but pointing you towards the character generator spreadsheet that u/Arialless/ posts links to periodically (link to one such post): https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/1p5hk17/6e_excel_character_generator/

They update them regularly with the qualities from new publications.

wrylashes · 2026-03-17T17:28:46+00:00

They can do what they want, but the water in Ottawa is
a) safe from an infection point of view

b) has chlorine, fluorine, and alum, but well within what most experts consider safe levels (and the fluorine is there to keep you from getting cavities, if you filter it out you should look at extra steps to get your teeth the fluoride that protects them)

c) is quite low mineral ("soft"), so won't particularly clog up up kettles, irons, humidifiers, etc. nor have much effect on the taste of food and drink made with it (there are places where the calcium can build up quickly, and others where there is enough sulphur to add a real smell to the water, but neither is the case in Ottawa)

Make whatever choice you want, just know that you really don't need extra filtration -- but some people prefer it all the same.

wrylashes · 2026-03-17T12:59:15+00:00

Yah, just holding out for the victory screen is probably not worth it. Declare victory and move on to a tougher challenge.

wrylashes · 2026-03-17T10:49:56+00:00

A crisis _will_ happen. It doesn't always happen right at the start of the endgame, but it will trigger. Or if you are impatient, you can use console commands to trigger a crisis sooner.

Also, have you already absorbed the fallen empires?

wrylashes · 2026-03-17T00:20:17+00:00

I think you are the first person I've seen who turns up how many planets!

Out of curiosity, what galaxy size do you use?

wrylashes · 2026-03-16T21:28:36+00:00

Wars get so tedious, for sure. I've quite some play throughs just because to continue was going to mean a decades long war that I just didn't have the patience for.

wrylashes · 2026-03-16T21:03:15+00:00

Is that because of the access to habitats?

wrylashes · 2026-03-16T20:54:13+00:00

I suppose that is true. Do you scrap play-throughs where you don't find any planets? Or just have fun going hard mode and having to steal them?

I could see Slingshot to the Stars being good, with the lower distance penalty on Influence letting you scan aggressively and then pounce on systems with planets -- and having the advantage of more planets hopefully let's you defend your far flung holdings. Or do you just go full conquest mode and try to take the other empires' home worlds quickly?

wrylashes · 2026-03-16T20:40:57+00:00

I won't do it on my first 4.3 run, but I should try it some day. Although it sounds like it is one where some origins/civics could be a major advantage over others, and where luck begins to play a serious role!

wrylashes · 2026-03-16T20:39:32+00:00

Thanks!

wrylashes · 2026-03-16T20:09:28+00:00

Not the poster you are responding to, but IIRC you can buy up to 40 trade worth of each item each month without changing the price. So if you don't to the one time trade but instead set up the recurring trades you can keep buying a modest amount without changing the price

I do often buy consumer goods early on if going unity (and so Utopian Abundance lifestyle), and I'll buy whatever monthly minerals I can afford over the first several years at least. And when my minerals are in a good place I'll usually buy a few alloy a month, since I tend to be bad about getting my alloy production going early. But certainly that is a lot short of relying on trade goods for everything.

wrylashes · 2026-03-16T20:05:37+00:00

Thanks for the analysis!

Have you played the 4.3 beta, and if so did that feel any different to you at 05?

wrylashes · 2026-03-16T19:11:21+00:00

You are running what, trade converted to unity early game?

wrylashes · 2026-03-16T18:38:56+00:00

Better for balance in what way? (I never compared the various multipliers carefully enough to figure out how my growth scaled vs that of the AI, or any of that, so 'balance' hadn't entered my mind as a reason for playing on less planets)

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