Triop
Here you can see how to put fire extinguishers on the inside of you ship instead of on the outside.
Overall Basic Theory when designing your own ship
Hodyn The overall problem with the ship that you have shown is that it only has weapons in one direction. You could destroy that ship for the same budget with only one weapon. I will eventually revise the Manedrix's design to remove the weaknesses at the bow and stern, but a broadside build forces you to have a lot of weapons.
A Behemoth like this forces you to either use mods, a fleet, or a ship that probably costs more than it does.
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Not really, only took 2 of my Behemoths to take it out, although I had to manually control it as AI is borked on ships that size (AI insists on going through your ship and face it from the other side, so what happens is that any ship fighting it just presents its back to it). Total cost was about 7.2 mil+. Problem with broadside builds is that over half your firepower isn't shooting half of the time. Also the larger your ship gets, the more expensive the firepower to cost ratio becomes.
Also, for capital ships that size, missiles makes good point blank broadsides since they can't be stopped by PD at that range XD
Aurellia you said
Aurellia You could destroy that ship for the same budget with only one weapon.
Well, I dare you to try. Really, i do.
Your ship looks breathtaking. It's beautiful. But check this:
This is Triple Exodia, another of @Teg's designs, which costs under a third than yours ERN Celestia.
I put them two together just to show you how designing the ship is trickier than it might look.
Again, it costs less than a third than Celestia. But if i focus maneuvering to keep at one side (really get into your turning radius, which is easy since it's so long) i can get somewhere relatively safe, since Triple Exodia has some very good shielding, and just "eat away" through your ship. as your missiles gets shot mid-flight and your bullets have little to no effect on those shields.
After severing crew mobility to the front part of the ship (if there was any, but just in case) i focus on (literally) digging through the ship to get to the most dangerous weapons, the Ion Blasters, but completely safe from it, since i'm inside your turning radius. If any of my shields gets too damaged, to the point of almost giving out, i just rotate my ship once. That gives more than enough time for the shield to rest.
whoops.... that's a problem.
Well... i'll deal with you later.
Bye bye, for now, most dangerous part of the ship.
Steady "corrosion" of your ship from now on, now that it is severed and the "head" has no forward nor backward thrusters, so it'll take some time to come back. Target weapons first, i forgot. lost a corner there, but no biggie, i just have to keep spinning.
Disable all your weapons, steadily. Oh, well, look who's back
No problem, just move out of reach.
Then steadily eat away at it, circling around it.
If i really had spent the time rotating shields and targeting all the right parts Triple Exodia would come out mostly unscathed, but i'm lazy and don't want to bother with the controls that much. And it costs less than a third than the oponent ship, so... I don't think it could take two Triple Exodia, one from each side.
My point is. Your ship is pretty, it's beautiful. Exodia or Triple Exodia isn't really pretty to look at, but the damage it does is much higher, much cheaper, thus it is much more efficient, and its only weakness is its corners, because they aren't really as well defended as the rest of the ship, and once that's gone it creates a pretty big opening. But if you rotate to give time for the shields to recover that can be easily overcome. Celestia doesn't have enough concentrated firepower to deal with those shields anyway. It's Missiles are very dangerous, though. Triple Exodia almost doesn't have enough point defense to deal with them. But they are really only dangerous at the first salvo. after that they shoot too sporadically to even be bothered with, the shields alone can hold them.
In short. Celestia is pretty, it works nicely. But not good enough against ships with implemented tactics, it has only brute raw power, and wins against most battleships simply because it's bigger, not because it's better.
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In reference to the part at the top of the post, wouldn't a ship designed for pure manoeuvrability be able to circle around the Exodia with relative ease? At one million, that is a lot of reactors, engines and crew compartments.
It seems my statement was a little too presumptive, but the result is the same, a cube or wedge is used to take it down. Designing a faction is rather hard when you're building cubes and wedges.
If I wanted a big ship with (some) design tactics, I'd use this.
A version of the Celestia that uses the front of the ship for all of it.
It has blind spots, I'm too lazy to patch them up because simply having the ship on screen murders my framerate.
(Lag warning)
(I have just gotten the idea to convert the from of this ship into a ship on it's own. I just hope I can get the thuster to armour ratio correct.)
I would test these colossal ships against larger ships (not larger than it, yikes), but I still have framerate to worry about. The Celestia has been nicknamed the Fork on the discord, I find that hilarious. Also, how do you download the ship and keep the name? I keep getting results like HiiJK4.
I also might produce a missile only variant of the Celestia, see if the game can be crashed through sheer missile swarms.
Aurellia But those ships are NOT cost-effective. You have to spend a LOT of money to get those, and, as i said, the only reason they win is because they're big.
Once you get through the first row of defenses they go down easily, even with a VERY MUCH cheaper ship. As you can see in the picture, i just picked it apart, made my own openings and stood, literaly, behind them. After i get to the control room, it'd be just junk floating around, so even if i get in front of the blasters i wouldn't be shot.
My point is: building big works, yes, but it's costly, and probably wouldn't even fly right. Building big with big openings makes it even easier to defeat if you target the right place. I know A.I. doesn't do all that, but maybe it will someday, and when manual controls and multiplayer get implemented, A.I. won't be even needed for 1v1 fights. Those designs are pretty, but lack in efficiency. a ship that costs less than a third than it costs can beat it.
after this point i'm just finishing the job.
My Behemoth MK3 definitely isn't a box or a wedge but works nicely against ships that are at your size. It just rams into the ship and stays there with its ion cannons slowly eating through the armour while the PD, armour and shields protect it for a very long time against the missiles. If it turns sideways into the other ship, its missile launchers are able to punch through even faster, delivering missile broadsides into the ship that cannot be countered by PD. It also slowly erodes to death rather than explode, so it can last a surprisingly long time while under heavy fire.
That being said, the volume of missile fire showed that it could probably use a few more PDs to be safe XD
dieaready Again. Cost efficiency. That's the whole point of designing it smart. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Behemoth would annihilate most things it's size, it really is a behemoth. But, again, cost efficiency. Behemoth costs 3.192.550 credits while Exodia costs 1.079.450 credits, nearly a third. But:
Even though it puts up a fight against it...
Exodia eventually comes out on top.
I'm not trying to say your designs suck, please, don't get me wrong. They are beautiful, they work nicely. But there's something about Exodia, about it's design, that just makes it way more efficient in a duel against anything that costs roughly the same, making it "worth" more than you pay for it. The whole point of discussing basic theories is to figure out what that something is, and implement in different ways.
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It did tremendously well against Cerberus, though, which is tough for that price range.
Also, i think it's worth noting that Exodia doesn't make any use of Missiles. Missiles are, in my opinion, for missile specialized ships. Trying to broaden your weapon deck per ship too much is a bad idea, in my opinion. Counter for all of them, yes, but focus on dealing two, at most 3 types of damage.
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Hodyn I know, my Behemoth has its limits. It is very good at tanking damage, but its output is a bit lacking. It can take on 2 Cerberus on AI, 3 when controlled manually.
That being said, I've made a ship that can win against the Triple Exodia (the one which splits into 3 ships) for roughly the same cost and wins 9/10 times or better :p I'm pretty sure I got the theories down pat.
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The ONLY thing that stops the Exodia from becoming rubble is the proximity of it's reactors to the shields, All of it's survivability is in that combination. Well, that and the sheer amount of shields.
The compartmentalisation of the sections also lends to the survivability, but it would still be useless without the shield combo. The position of the control rooms also supports this, because if you bisect the ship, you now have two to deal with and if you don't have broadside capabilities, you're doomed.
It hands its efficiency of destroying ships to its weapon combo, which is electro bolts (anti-shield) and small cannons, which shoot fast projectiles. (anti-structure.)
Lastly, the final advantage this ship has is manoeuvrability. When you've finished drilling into this part of the ship, circle round and destroy these missile bays or the haphazardly grouped factories.
Overall, the further away the reactors are to the shields, the worse off the Exodia is.
The only counter I can think of is an electro-bolt thruster build.
That, or 20M worth of missiles.
I could attempt to replicate this, but I might struggle with keeping it as cheap as the designer for this ship has.
The Exodia's weakness lies in its manoeuvrability, or rather, its lack of. It struggles in turns and often over compensates, so if you can exploit that, you have a much easier time at killing it.
Aurellia he ONLY thing that stops the Exodia from becoming rubble is the proximity of it's reactors to the shields, All of it's survivability is in that combination. Well, that and the sheer amount of shields.
Yes. that's part of it's design, after all.
Aurellia The compartmentalisation of the sections also lends to the survivability, but it would still be useless without the shield combo.
Ive tried implementing something like that in my designs, but never in a way that is good enough for it to actually work. Can you put that theory into a design of yours? 'cause i sure can't, at least not yet lol
Aurellia The position of the control rooms also supports this, because if you bisect the ship, you now have two to deal with and if you don't have broadside capabilities, you're doomed.
That's one of the reasons why i like Exodia so much. But implementing 1v2 tactics while designing a counter for Exodia just wouldn't work, i think. Broadside has it's place, undeniably, but not against Exodia. Not cost-effectively, no.
Aurellia It hands its efficiency of destroying ships to its weapon combo, which is electro bolts (anti-shield) and small cannons, which shoot fast projectiles. (anti-structure.)
Indeed. Marvelous combo. Can you believe he came up with that idea to counter Cerberus? That's what it looked like, at least.
Aurellia Lastly, the final advantage this ship has is manoeuvrability. When you've finished drilling into this part of the ship, circle round and destroy these missile bays or the haphazardly grouped factories.
That's another thing i like about it. Despite dealing heavy damage over time and being a great shield-killer, it is also quite agile. It's like there's little to no weaknesses to it, apart from the fact that it is small. Maybe @Teg can create some sort of Exodia Prime. a longer version of Exodia, to fight bigger ships. Or maybe Triple Exodia is better than simply a longer Exodia... something to test.
Aurellia Overall, the further away the reactors are to the shields, the worse off the Exodia is.
Well, reactors close to the shields is part of its design. The idea here is to find out what are good design ideas and which are not. Having reactors far away from where they are actually going to be implemented is a bad idea, obviously.
Aurellia The only counter I can think of is an electro-bolt thruster build.
That, or 20M worth of missiles.
I could attempt to replicate this, but I might struggle with keeping it as cheap as the designer for this ship has.
That's the thing. I haven't found anything that can counter Exodia without costing at least double the amount it does. That's what i find so beautiful about this design. It just works.
I look forward to discussing this further, maybe we can arrive at some insight about ship designing basics as a whole. FOR SCIENCE!
dieaready Just show me your design that, as you said:
dieaready I've made a ship that can win against the Triple Exodia (the one which splits into 3 ships) for roughly the same cost and wins 9/10 times or better
countered 3 Exodia, costs roughly the same and wins almost every time.
I say you're lying. Prove me wrong. Show me the design.
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Hodyn didn't exactly mean to bring it up here, but you were going on and on about the Exodia so...
I'll post it when I'm ready, probably soon seeing as the competition is about full now. I'll even do a writeup explaining how and why it works so well to beating the Triple Exodia.
The Triple Exodia is a very nice and almost perfectly optimized ship, and I'll say it took me almost 10+ hrs and countless trial runs to prove my theory and beat it.
