Ship Design Advice for Crystal

[Frederick_d_Ohlmann]

10 Cristal armor is very important to max out the effect of cristal armor in my opinion

[Renegade 13]

Yes, at least 10 crystal armor is absolutely essential for crystal to be useful. It's the only way to get the full benefit of the shielding ability.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

If you remember to USE shield generators..... unless of course CA generates shields anyways, generator or not. (I don't know, I've never paid much attention to it)

You mustn't forget weapons, though; Stealth/Scattering armor is OK, but if the enemy has the sensors to look through your Stealth Armor it's generally useless, as the 15% defense bonus won't stack with Scattering Armor and ECM. If you take away the Stealth Armor and replace it for, say, 20kT with armor and 30kT with weapons, you still get pretty good armor protection with increased firepower.

What you could also do is use two or more types of ships, a Cover Defender and an Offensive Warship. Cover ships would have a lot of armor and shields but little weapons; they'd be hard to destroy but wouldn't pack much firepower. The Offensive Warships would have less armor/shields but would pack a lot more firepower. If you keep your ships in, say, Decoy Arrowhead formation (with an Offensive lead ship) with Cover ships as the front arrow and Warships as the rear, the enemy will be faced with a choice; pound away at the heavily shielded Defenders who are hard to kill but can keep pouring fire into the enemy for a long time and ignore the heavily-armed Warships, but if (s)he chooses to attack the heavily-armed formation of Warships they'll be left with tough ships difficult to kill that can keep firing for pretty long.

[douglas]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
You mustn't forget weapons, though; Stealth/Scattering armor is OK, but if the enemy has the sensors to look through your Stealth Armor it's generally useless, as the 15% defense bonus won't stack with Scattering Armor and ECM.

Incorrect. One each of stealth armor, scattering armor, and ECM all stack for a total defense bonus of 90%. This stacking is completely independent of anything else, you still get stealth armor's defense bonus even if your opponent has the sensors to see through the cloak. Unfortunately, the Religious Talisman makes all defense bonuses irrelevent, so replacing the stealth and scattering armor with other stuff makes sense against a religious enemy.

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
What you could also do is use two or more types of ships, a Cover Defender and an Offensive Warship. Cover ships would have a lot of armor and shields but little weapons; they'd be hard to destroy but wouldn't pack much firepower. The Offensive Warships would have less armor/shields but would pack a lot more firepower. If you keep your ships in, say, Decoy Arrowhead formation (with an Offensive lead ship) with Cover ships as the front arrow and Warships as the rear, the enemy will be faced with a choice; pound away at the heavily shielded Defenders who are hard to kill but can keep pouring fire into the enemy for a long time and ignore the heavily-armed Warships, but if (s)he chooses to attack the heavily-armed formation of Warships they'll be left with tough ships difficult to kill that can keep firing for pretty long.

It's a nice idea, but it's not doable in SEIV because you can't specify which ships go where in the formation other than the lead ship.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I thought defense bonuses didn't stack.....?

Then again, it could just be my using of SEIVG 1.61 that can be confusing at times.

It is hard (read: impossible) to fully control it when assigning fleets, yes, but if you're playing Classic turns and tactical combat it can be done, you just have to add all ships to the Combat Group in the right order.

However, you could have a fleet with a custom strategy that includes "Break Formation for Warships" to move lots of ships at the same time, but keep them out of formation in battle. They'd fight as an unorganised mob, but if you make the Cover Defenders slightly faster than the Offensive Warships, it might still work.

Then again, the religious enemy could be using very fast ships with batteries of WMGs, Plasma Missiles/CSMs and assorted other long-range weaponry.....

[douglas]

Defense (and offense, but that's irrelevent in stock) bonuses stack if they come from different component families. Within a component family, only the highest bonus applies. These bonuses also stack with a bonus from the hull.

[Suicide Junkie]

Defense bonuses don't stack for components in the same family...

IE you can't stack ECM I, ECM II, and ECM III.
But you can stack an ECM with the hull ability, and the stealth armor, and the scattering armor, and any modded bonus you add if it has a unique family number.

[Zereth]

Wow, Stealth and Scattering armor stack? I didn't know that. Better go revise my usual ship designs then.

[Suicide Junkie]

Click the "To Hit Modifiers" button on the design screen, and you can see the total effects of the components you are adding.

[Enigma]

Wow thanks for all the advice. So far the ship that Douglas recommended seems to work the best in the simulators. We are fighting two major enemies with large fleets. One is religious the other is not, so I can not abandon my defensive bonus's. I have not had a chance to try it out in a real battle yet.

I have two designs - 1 with Anti-proton Beams and 1 with Shield depleters and shard cannon.

I have also used a "Shield-Ship" as my fleet leader and looking replays indicates that he tends to suckup alot of fire in the first round so I usually put one in a fleet.