thatPolarBear Uh you know that this thread is my guide. So no need to link to the same page you are posting in...
Cosmoteer Ultimate Ship Design and Part Guide!
thatPolarBear Thank you, but you're wrong about the missiles, and after I added the moving walkway, it started firing a lot faster. The other tips are very helpful, though.
falcon500 In general:
Oneye Always make sure your ship uses internal armor to protect its sensitive components
Oneye Modules (or something like them) are THE MAIN thing that will make your ships better
Oneye Don’t use too many corridors
Oneye Keep in mind that reactor efficiency also relies heavily on how distant the things that have to be powered are
Oneye it is sometimes good to have your shields slightly forward so they can stop missile AOE from damaging the weapons underneath
Oneye If you organize the 1x2 armor blocks in a similar way that bricks are organized in a wall (one’s middle goes on top of the edges of the two bicks below it) it’ll form what’s called a Interlaced Armor Design.
Now that I'm finished with quoting from this guide, I'd like to point out:
-The two ammo factories near the railguns tip seem pretty useless
-The placement of your missile launchers usually is rather unbeneficial for the firerate. They'll also chain-explode should one get desroyed before the alpha strike
-Forward missile launchers facing sidewarts rarely deal much damage due to the time missiles take to turn towards the target
-One should never ever place a control room next to a reactor! (Unless you want said cr to blow up with the reactor for any reason...)
(You might also want to look at
Oneye list of many different weapon combos that are good together
again)
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CursedPh4nt0m Well in a month or two I'll be updating my guide with changes from 14.5, so expect a lot of those quotes to change, or at least 3 of them.
Oneye Guess that won't matter too much. Glad the guide will get another update soon.
You wouldn't mind telling be which quotes you're referring to btw?
CursedPh4nt0m Well, crew changes might make modules less necessary although they will probably still be more cost efficient. Missile AOE will no longer go through shields, and many good weapon combos will be added/changed with the addition of new missiles.
Oneye I just tried some of the new stuff and ended up with this railfan-flakwall-hybrid:
Despite beeing able to beat all ingame ships, this things side is awfully vulnerable to missile attacks and the railguns firerate basically halfs after some time. Any idea on how to fix these problems without changing too much?
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CursedPh4nt0m I would get rid of the farthest side modules and pd. Then just add good armor there and you should be fine, you have flak for missile defense anyway.
Could you more explicitly mention not using crew or armor as space-fillers? It's one thing on aesthetic builds, but I've been noticing a lot of people inflating their ship costs by 50-100% just with useless crew.
Also related: compensating for crap internal layouts with armies of crew.
Updated for 14.7.
Oneye On the Nuke bomber part Ultralight is written wrong...
Also a particular suggestion by on CR placement, I usually place CRs on a place that, if the enemy actually ever gets to it, I'm dead anyways, and it's beneficial for some reasons:
It is considered that, a good strat to defeat a ship is usually targeting a ship's "weak angles", or be it, places that you'll do the most damage if you hit, they usually are places that have multiple reactors in sequence, split parts of the ship, or damage CRs, by placing the CRs on places that, if the enemy ever even gets to you're already dead, you're effectively eliminating potential "Weak angles", these places include:
-Middle of the thrusters for walls (do not that I usually built Ultralights, a good analogy would be a flying flamethrower surrounded in C4, it can kill a lot but if it gets hit it's kaput)
-Middle of the railguns for Railgun Barges (If the enemy gets there it means you lost your railguns, thus you're already dead)
-Extreme ends of the arms on V ships (killing both extremes means that you likely heavily damaged the center as well, or be it, just killed all the modules composing the V ship)
-Middle/back of Missile Barges (If an enemy flanked you it's likely they'll go for the CRs anyways, so placing them on the front only makes them more easy to be sniped by railguns)
-With the Ions on Ion Rammers (Usually these designs are particularly explosive around that part, and if that part is ever destroyed you're already dead)
Doing this, the enemy can't go for your CR, as "targeting" your CR will be as good as targeting anywhere else, making your ship overall stronger.
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Oneye add that you can actually fire rail guns through a single layer of armor it’s a interesting thing that could be useful if you have some cash to spend on protecting the rail gun
I’m not kidding it’s very cool
Rougechicken Me and some others were researching that a while back, but we found that it makes the rail shots too weak for the little extra protection it gives.
Oneye could you do a section on Hitboxes? I mean, Cannons/Large Cannons seem pretty obvious, but "where the hitbox starts" is not quite as clear for the other weapons.
newageofpower Good idea, I'll add that.
how many PD per reactor ?
DanielTheMooCow 4 directly connected if you need constant firing, flak is better for missile defense though, so PD is mostly for the rears of ships where you don't need to worry about its power consumption.
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Hmmm, nice guide but you didn't talk about nukes in your weapons section (but you did about mines oddly enough) or nuke flingers. (the current and most disgusting meta) but otherwise great guide! Hopefully this helps the people struggling with competitive ship designs!
Northerner Oof, didn't see that, will add nukes to the weapons section. Also nuke flingers are going to be gone next update (mostly, they will still get 2x nuke range), but I'll add them anyway.
Ok, updated with the spinner and MSF ship type and added nukes to the weapon section. also made a "balance news" section.