What is the best possible ship design of each class against a generalized opponent?
Hopefully people have fun with this topic.
Assumptions:
You are designing the ship design in a vacuum, without knowledge of what opponents this hypothetical ship might face.
As such, specific counter-designs may outperform this design in particular cases where they hard-counter the opponent (perhaps significantly so), and certain opponents might beat this design – no design can cover all scenarios.
This design should tend to maximize the types of opponents it can combat well while minimizing the types it does poorly against.
Your choice whether to consider special components gotten from Guardians/Shroud, or whether to just consider generic components. You can even consider both if you want.
End of Assumptions
I’ll give an attempt:
Battleship – Giga Cannon, 4x Neutron Launchers; Focus on shields to protect against Neutron Launchers, Tackyons, Plasma (which have greater anti-hull power than the Kinetic equivalents do). Fill remaining slots with Armor. Artillery computer.
This design will have problems with Corvettes, yes, but against less evasive crash it will be the king of alpha-strikes. Giga Cannons have longer range (150) than the launchers (130) and strip the shields first; then the Neutron Launchers blow the enemy up.
Of course, feel free to debate this and for other ship classes.
Answer
It’s certainly not optimal against highly specialised fleets, but the following designs hardly ever let me down vs the AI or crises given similar strength:
Corvettes:
3s slots – 2x autocannon, 1x plasma, afterburners if evasion cap isn’t reached naturally, otherwise random special Aug module. Swarm combat computer.
Destroyers:
2m 2s slots: 2x medium plasma, 2x autocannon. Chance to hit Aug module. Picket combat computer.
Cruisers:
2l 2m slots: 1x neutron launcher, 1x kinetic artillery, 1x m plasma, 1x m gauss cannon. Chance to hit Aug module. Line combat computer.
Battleships:
Xl bow – rest l slots: giga cannon, 3x neutron launcher, 1x kinetic artillery, chance to hit Aug module. Line combat computer.
Titan beam, mix of neutrons and artillery, tracking aura and chance to hit Aug.
Defense wise, armour and shields mixed mostly evenly. Special modules, armour, and shields can improve the performance drastically, as when exchanging the base chance to hit aug slot with enigmatic decoders.
It’s extremely generalised but there is something to be said for the reliability of such a fleets performance. It starts dealing damage at long range providing some good alpha strike damage. Individual hits from Neutron Launcher, Artillery and XL Slots is really high so the enemy fleet gets fewer rolls to retreat. Incorporating PD would be unwise in a void scenario as it maybe 100% inapplicable. Thus using these slots for weapon modules is better as it reliably boosts your own dps, and dead missile boats can’t fire at you either. While teching up plasmas need to be exchanged with normal lasers, auto cannons with the normal kinetic line weapons, depending on what tech level is superior.
I put a lot of focus on chance to hit and tracking, as in the given scenario we can’t tell whether an opponents fields mostly larger hulls or small evasion corvettes. The massive bonuses on chance to hit and tracking combat computers helps applying the damage of our big hitters reliably even against smaller targets, thus boosting dps again significantly (Calculating chance to hit from large slots vs diverse evasion rating manually really opened my eyes in that regard. It’s a much bigger dps increase than the defense increase from shield capacitors for example).
If you want to min max within this framework, battleships only with a buff bot titan could probably beat a mixed fleet in performance but I like some visual diversity.
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