Building Academy

YAreyaREdAzE

damkiller I should start designing modules. also, what can i test it against to test its practicality?

Hatter

YAreyaREdAzE
Since damkiller hasn't responded, try fighting this:

Or this:

Or both at the same time if you're feeling really confident, I guess.

damkiller

Oh sorry I'm not so active anyway you can try also mines [upl-image-preview [upl-image-preview

This ones are petty old because I don't have so many 1mils
But they still might be a challege

Altraxia

I figured it was time for me to improve my building skills. Can you point out some flaws?

CaptainRedstone

Altraxia
For both ships, you might consider improving crew access. Try to get the crew, supplier, and part being supplied all as close as possible, and take crew congestion into account. The best way to test crew congestion and pathing is to either use direct control to operate the ship while monitoring the inside, or delete all parts, and undo, essentially resetting the ship.

On the first ship, you might want more thrust, as speed is king in the meta. Also if you move flaks 2 and 4 up, and replace the small reactors with storages, it saves just under 50k. You might need to adjust those flaks' ammo factories though

On the second ship, focus on optimizing reactors, as they're really expensive. For instance on your middle module, simply by drawing power from the above medium reactor instead of a small reactor, you save 25K-30K. Your side cannon modules only need a small reactor, which immediately saves 25k each, let alone compacting everything else aroudn it. That being said, the best way to save money on reactors there is to use a pair of large reactors powering the three non-center modules on each side. Note that a lot of higher level competitive designs will use large reactors and large amounts of corridors/moving walkways, because of how much cheaper it is than individual reactors

Hatter

I have been summoned.

Altraxia

Barrage has unnecessary power. You could run the entire thing off of an LR if you got fancy with storages and crew assignments. Top four engine rooms are underutilized.The two CR's are in the blast radius if the missile factories are detonated. An attack from the side can blow up the two missile modules and take the CR's with it. Bear in mind the flak array at the front will not stop ion beams, a big enough beam core can drill through it and blow the ship apart.
Try fighting this.

Bombardier v2 also suffers from excess power. The medium reactor on the side modules can support far more then three shields. Low lateral thrust. CR's are in blast radius of the medium reactors in front of them. Middle CR can be lit on fire and die because it has no access to the fire extinguishers. Two crew quarters in the middle engine module have no doors, and are unnecessary. Could cut down on corridor by supplying the ammo factories through crew quarters. They're low draw enough for it not to really matter.

Try fighting this. Testing indicates the Bombardier v2 can already win occasionly. Try to improve that.

You rely on shields as a primary defense. If they go down, most of you ships gets splode'd. Consider armoring the fronts more and see how that works.

CaptainRedstone Large reactors have big 'splode, though. Protecting them well enough spaces everything out and is difficult in walls. Meta LR ships are linear missile barges, TB railfans, and ioncores where the cheap power is necessary. I haven't seen a LR based wall outside of some experiments. The challenge with LR reactors is the delay in power to the shields, shields can have very high draw when under fire and the distance adds both delay and crew costs.
My opinion is that MR are better suited to walls. The walkways are shorter and therefore less prone to severing. Agree about removing the small reactors.

Alioth Disagree about armor. It's great for soaking alpha strikes, cheaper then shields for the same HP, and logistically less complicated. Downsides are weight and lack of regeneration. Anti-shield weapons will take down shields.

Also, single shot railguns suffer from anything double shielded. It can be killed by something 25k cheaper.

I'd say try fighting this and beat it, but your design is so small that there's not really any room left to optimize.

Altraxia

Hatter CaptainRedstone

I took way too much time improving the Bombardier and didn't have enough left to do the Barrage. It was able to consistently beat Hatter's ship,but sometimes have trouble reloading.

I'll try to do the Barrage's remake tomorrow

Alioth

I just started with Cosmoteer and after playing bounty hunter on easy for a bit (modifying the original starter ships and struggling with repair costs) I created my own starter ship with rail gun and shield just below the max allowed cost of 80k on normal.
What is your opinion on it?
I have a feeling that shields and big weapons that cripple the other ship quickly are better than going for sustained damage and armor. Is this the right way to go?

Here is the Bloodclaw frigate.
My biggest surprise was how well I was able to keep the shields up and the rail gun firing with a crew far below recommendation.
It is really a different world compared to the original starter ship

Altraxia

Took me four hours and still wasn't happy. Although it can win against Hatter's ion ship,it loses half the front while doing so. I don't know what to do to improve it anymore

Oneye

Altraxia Not bad! Definitely an improvement over your last version.

As for improvements:
Your front shields aren't going to survive long under constant fire, and I wouldn't try to fix that. Instead, I'd try to keep the shields from getting hit at all (you can figure that out 😉). Your flak have a pretty restricted firing arc the way you used the armor at the front. They also are set to both attack and defend mode so the ship will try to get into close range which isn't exactly good for a missile kiter. Additionally, your engine rooms are still being underused. You could probably cut the number of engine rooms in half and be fine. I made a refit, but I'll only post it here if you request it.

For a testing ship, try to beat this on normal AI: (Credit to Hatter for paint)

Altraxia

Oneye Took all night (again) and came up with this:

It beat your ship precisely four times.

~~I swear,if that's the kind of ships competitive experts make for fun,I might never try competitive multiplayer~~

Hatter

Altraxia At first glance, the internal layout could be optimized. Second to top crew factories don't have a dedicated conveyor, instead use corridor.

In testing, the missile modules tend to chain and the flaks can't effectively cover the nose. The missiles only have to deal with one flak at a time when approaching, instead of overlapping fields of fire. Because of this, missiles have a tendency to drill through a side of the frontal armor cap and take out multiple missile modules. This is not helped by the sheer wideness of the your barge, which gives it more area to defend. Consider spacing out the missile modules.

Missile factories close to the large reactor don't need energy storages and can run directly given dedicated conveyors. Figure out how far away 'close' is through trial and error.

Small reactors are exposed from the sides. Second engine room is crew intensive to supply through the other engine room.

I'd recommend trying competitive multiplayer, because 98% of the people playing aren't experts who build 1.5 mill ships for fun.

Oneye

Altraxia As Hatter said, most people are not experts. At this point, we are being a little nitpicky since you are already doing better than most when it comes to effective ship design. If you went into multiplayer right now with that you would not have a hard time unless you came across one of the few top-tier players. Fighting against skilled players is a big part of improving your ships though. Sometimes you can only find out weaknesses in your ship when facing someone skilled enough to exploit them. Also, multiplayer is required if you ever want to improve your piloting skills. Luckily you can learn to pilot ships against randoms, but if you want to learn how to pilot well in different situations you will have to practice with someone skilled.

The most important thing to remember in multiplayer is that winning and losing is not important, only improving your skills. So, whenever you lose, think through the fight and what you could have done differently. Then, think about your ship and what weaknesses it had that your opponent exploited. Doing this instead of "Ugh, my ship just sucks" will help you improve your skills as well as keep you from feeling confused about your losses.

As for it taking all night to build a ship, that will change once you get used to it. Once you have the concepts down and a plan for your ship, the building will only take around half an hour to an hour for a 1.5mill. It is a lot easier after you know the optimal layouts for different things and don't have to constantly be changing your entire ship around.

Also, if you're really interested in improving your shipbuilding skills you might want to be more active on the discord server(s) since they are where most of the competitive players are. The multiplayer LFG channel on the main server is also a great place to get someone skilled to test your ships against.

With all that being said, if you truly do not enjoy building optimized ships then maybe competitive multiplayer is not for you. Personally I'd give it a chance though. Starting out is always the hardest part, and it can only get more fun from here.

I_Am_Jarvis

Man, it's been a long time since I was last here... Well in any case, I got two new ones after coming back into the gameplay after a few months of being away from it. That said, there's two things I figured I'd try my hand at:

One, an attempt at making an effective, maxed out railgun craft with turning prioritized WELL over speed, along with missile backups just because I had the space for it. There's almost no corridor space in it whatsoever, so I'm not sure if this approach was at all... ideal. Good all-round defense, though, especially considering the decent turning.

Dread Bolt (2,568,000)
"A long, thin Capitol-class ship, this Dreadnought specializes in long-range combat. Very slow, with minimal reverse thrust, but with good turning and an all-purpose defense, though incredibly vulnerable once compromised."

The other idea I had involved making a small, cheap craft with good defense and utilizing a 4-way merged Ion Prism setup.

Trilobyte (476,500)
"Cost effective Cruiser-class ship, built in a way to vastly improve turning in a sense that complements it's merged beam weapon system. Slow, but heavily defended for its size."

I'm still playtesting both in Bounty Hunter runs, but some input wouldn't hurt, I guess.

Hatter

I_Am_Jarvis First ship has poor damage control, which you know. A single rail being taken out will chain with the back portion, destroying the other rail. Hits to the side will cause a rail to blow up. The small reactors can be consolidated. Poor defense anywhere but the front, and even the front could use some armor Forward speed is abyssal, as you know. No engine rooms. Railguns supplied through crew quarters/bunks. Excessive amount of doors.

Try fighting this

or this:

Second ship, 4 ions into one prism is inefficient because of the beam combination mechanics. You could probably run the entire ship off of 2 medium reactors with efficient use of walkways. The small reactors in the back are relatively exposed, and unnecessary to power just an engine room, which only needs at most one reactor, barring boost shenanigans.
Try fighting this

Try to break the habit of putting small reactors everywhere you need power instead of using a farther away larger reactor to power multiple components. Also, keep in mind some components explode when damaged, try to move them away from other explosive components.

I_Am_Jarvis

Hatter Yeah, with testing, the rear section was proving to be especially vulnerable, plus the obnoxiously slow forward speed was getting to me, so I reworked the back section a bit and even added a little bit MORE to turning, as little as it might do. It's slightly more forward thrust, but now there's nothing for reverse thrust except two small thrusters. Also, I actually initially had the more efficient crew quarters, buuuut then I started thinking about aesthetic as well as trimming down crew counts to cut costs and went for more of the smaller bunks. It's OKAY, but it's not exactly something I could ever think to use for anything SERIOUS, with how hilariously vulnerable it is to anything that can't be shot down with Point Defense. Here's the new version that I had worked my way towards during my own testing, standing at a now current price of 2,576,500

With full consideration to the critique for the Trilobyte, I've made a few adjustments accordingly to the mentioned with exception to the beams, because those were the things the ship idea revolved around anyways, and yes, I'm fully aware that it's inefficient, but with the fact that I BELIEVE the total combined damage is 273%, which is being aimed through two prisms chained, I doubt it'll make a significant enough difference to even be bothered, honestly... Still, the changes made slimmed down the cost significantly, with replacing the small reactors with storage, even with modifying the armor and changing the medium reactors out for large reactors. Heck, I even added two more shields and storages to better protect the reactors from the front. Let me know if this is more to your liking, what with the price being chunked down to 420,000 XD

Edit: . . . I JUST realized I completely forgot to add FTL drives! Darn it all!

I_Am_Jarvis

Okay, I had to add two FTL Drives to the Trilobyte, which added 18,000 to the cost, but at least now it's COMPLETELY functional... So much for that 420,000 price, now it's 438,000 :/

I_Am_Jarvis

Completely spaced on the remark about doors and reactors, so I've edited the Dread Bolt accordingly as well. Slimmed the price down to 2,290,000

Oneye

I_Am_Jarvis

Oneye Looking at what you're saying, yeah it does look like it has way too many missile factories, and making the adjustments, as you said, WILL end up requiring a complete overhaul on the interior. I'll see what I can do to trim the excess, though I say again that the bunks instead of quarters were more for aesthetic and cutting cost since it actually doesn't need nearly as much crew as the recommended value. Like... the thing is an absolute beast in the B.H. Elite areas, haven't tested it against Vanguard areas though yet, but I'll refrain from THAT until after making the necessary adjustments. For the thing about crew management, though, that much is something I used to mess around with when it was introduced, but it got to be more hassle than it was worth, so I usually just work around any need for it as a personal preference, especially for larger craft (The Trilobyte MAY have been an exception, but I only did that for the heck of it and found that it didn't really change anything)

For the things about the Trilobyte, speaking of, I don't know about making the adjustments for like... THE most ideal layout without just COMPLETELY reworking the entire thing to regain the aesthetic I was going for. I can certainly try, but it will in fact require a complete overhaul. As far as what's said about the Ion Prisms go, how it was set up was more for personal preference, more specifically the outer most prism is more or less for ease of aim, but it can most certainly still function without it, not to say, though, that it shouldn't still be utilized and defended.

That all being said, I've got one more that I actually made using... ALMOST everything that I've gathered from just these conversations (minus the thing about doors, I'm going to work on that through trial and error without hampering just how stupidly effective it's proving ti be) and it makes an absolute joke of not just singular enemies, but it seems to do very well against squads as well... Like... I will say this, I was very skeptical about this, in terms of whether or not it'd do better than another more recent build I made (It involves just taking the idea of excess and expanding upon it in an organized fashion... It's decent, but it's definitely not efficient by any means XD), but it's working so freaking well... It's passing through Elites with little more than scratches, so I will DEFINITELY be testing it against Vanguard zones. In the meantime, though, I will definitely check out that guide, I will certainly continue testing, and MAYBE I should consider testing more in creative than in Bounty Hunter XD

In any case, I don't have a name for it yet, couldn't think of one, but this is what I got, clocking in at 2,378,500 (though a bunch of that IS in doors, as I kinda already mentioned, and I will, again, trim those down as needed, maybe also trim some of the armor that proves to be unnecessary... also the double Medium Reactors on either side, I will definitely change that out as soon as I get back into it, actually... That was probably dumb...)

Hatter

I_Am_Jarvis Elite, if I remember correctly, has a maximum ship value of 825,000 credits. Your ship is well over twice the price of any singular opposition. Testing indicates that it dies 1v1 versus most vanguard ships, such as the Aradama, Ipssissmus, Cerberus, Cegna Rei, and Iridium. All of which are lower priced then it.

I presume the oversized railguns can kill Elite ships before they close to range and kill it. In the future, consider testing it against ships closer to the same pricepoint. Creative helps with that.

That ship has the factories too far away from everything else and little firepower in general. It's not worth it for the adjacency bonus. The reactors and various factories chain. Too many doors and clustered medium reactors, which you know about. The sides don't need that many shields. Or any shields at all, really.

Try fighting against this ship.