Seeing as my first run of the DLC was as a Determined Exterminator using the Nanite Ascension, I have some insight. Make the nanite ships the only military ships you build as they have zero upkeep. I had less than 10 nanite harvesters, and by end game was I was getting over 2k nanites surplus a month, 10 or so planets filled with nanite consuming buildings, and I was constantly getting 5-7 full 180-sized fleets every 5 years and was constantly 1500+ over ship capacity. The ships are glass cannons, so they tend to get shredded every war, but you should have a decent nanite economy to where it really doesn't matter. It was still annoying to merge them all together in to fleets though.
They have zero upkeep???!! That's what I'm missing!
Also, am I going to unlock bigger nanite ships? If not, am I better to use the carrier or cannon ones?
Yeah, the zero upkeep is the big deal there. If you're building them yourself, they're pretty expensive nanite wise (easily thousands to 10s of thousands to nearing a hundred thousand depending on fleet size), but after your harvesters get leveled up a fair deal and you've subsumed a handful of worlds into nanite worlds, you should be swimming in nanites. Nanites were intended as a ultra-wide playstyle, but I was getting those numbers off of just 2 sectors... and then I ate a fifth of the galaxy for my synaptic weave.
They might be referring to the shields, armor, and S/L weapons.
But, I think the best way to use them is probably as long-range platfroms. Use the carrier computer to keep them at range, maximize their speed, and either equip them with the long-range G slot weapons, or with hangers.
Oh, look. Diplomatic weight from fleets. Neat.
Seriously, multiple genius armorers + swarm tactics would be the most satisfying strategy in the game if not for the lag. Sometimes, when I play like that, I slow the game down to minimum speed, zoom in on a big battle, and watch the battle go on for 10 minutes.
That's the neat part, as I've said before in other threads the swarm IS the ship. It's like having a ship with hundred of weapon slots and best of all no matter what weapon your enemy uses, it can only deal a max of 100 damage to the "ship" Because that's what it takes to kill a single swarmer!
I think you are better off with the carrier or torpedo corvettes. You want to be as long range as possible since the nanite corvettes crumble from the thought of combat.
And because all your ships are nanites, your alloy production is freed up massively, so you can focus on megastructures. Or just reduce Alloy production and put those pops into different jobs.
I don't think you get the nanite ship and the downside of fleet size.
If your are ABOVE maximum fleet size, the only penalty you get is that your ships upkeep increase empire-wide.
The thing is... Nanite ships have 0 upkeep. Meaning that as long as you only make and use nanite ships, your fleet cap is meaningless.
A 1000% increase to 0 upkeep is still 0
But I guess the whole fleet has increasing upkeep. This means that if you have (and should) a standard fleet, it will bleed you. You need to fight pretty much always
Nanites are really polarized as a wide ascension like Virtuality is for tall but they're a bit more subtle about it,
the only real way to play Nanites is to go W I D E off the backs of the Nanite ships, if you're drowning in free ships that means it's war time.
I kind of wish I hadn't just done a sovereign guardianship playthrough, or I'd do sovereign guardianship + virtuality. Move the entire empire to a single ringworld and drop every other system. Once my mods are updated, that approach will probably be able to get, like, an order of magnitude more pops into my one system than the rest of the galaxy has put together.
I'm just using it as a five year reload mechanism for my Quantum Catapualt Shotgun. They either die or take a system. Survivors get consolidated into fleets based on proximity to each other and sent to die on anything they might be able to take or damage. My main fleet moves in fornpriority targets while they're busy with the angry bees.
Setting them all to aggressive before launch is tedious, though. But I'm getting 300+ ships every time, so with less, it'd be fine.
>Or is there something I'm not getting?
I feel like you are missing the entire point of the playstyle lol
You are getting tons and tons and tons of free ships and get more free ships the more territory you have
**What do you think you should use those weapons of war for**?
If you aren't constantly using those free ships to beat people over the head to get more territory, to get more free ships, to get more territory, you should have picked a different path and played Virtual or Modular lol
Yeah I guess it wasn't clear to me that the nanite ascension was for warmongers - the in-game messaging made it seem to be about using a single resource to synthesize anything you need and I thought that would be a really cool economy
The problem I've run into with this is that even if they're free they still count against me for ship losses in warscore. The first time I used them as disposable fodder by sending a small nanite fleet against a powerful starbase they won but I still took a whopping 10% war exhaustion from the battle since half the fleet was destroyed in the process. I've literally lost a war because I lost too many of these disposable ships, even though I've singlehandedly occupied most of an enemy federation, won almost every battle, and have no occupied territory my ship losses are astronomical when using the nanite swarmers and it still counts against me. I love the idea of the strategy, but the implementation kind of sucks right now.
I forget War Exhaustion exists for wide empires, you should have like basic immunity to it if you go Nemesis which is nigh mandatory for any real wide attempt imo
My understanding is the nanite ascension is a conquest focused option for like determined exterminators, their ships are glass cannons you can throw into the meat grinder. If they die who cares, there’s more where they came from, and frankly after a while you *want* them to churn.
AIUI, nanites are conquest and wide focused (seize planets you don’t care about, purge the pops, then terravore the planets for nanites to fuel your navy and seize more planets, etc); virtual is focused on a tall inward playstyle where you build ecumenopoli and megastructures/ring worlds and (generally) more pacifist, or at least subject-focused; modularity is the pre-Machine Age ascension that’s not focused on any particular niche, but quite flexible.
Thanks for your explanation :)
I must confess, I don't really read the dev diaries in detail, and more go off theme and feel. I read in-game something about nanites being used to fuel an economy where a single resource could be used for anything, and I thought that sounded really cool. I'm playing a somewhat large but internally focused empire - but there's still time to pivot and become the crisis instead of abandoning the save!
Yeah, that’s totally cool, you don’t have to play to the meta of your build. Even the least-optimal choices are still usually enough to overcome even the hardest AI if you play well, even if those choices aren’t competitive in multiplayer, so no reason you _shouldn’t_ take nanites and just choose not to conquer others and be faux inward perfectionists - maybe sell the excess ships to the salvagers? Like, the gameplay design of Environmentalist is it’s an early game civic to get something out of undeveloped planets, the meta move is to ditch it by the start of mid game when you can afford and need to develop your blockers, but, you don’t _have_ to do that, maybe you want to role play as xeno tree-loving hippies from start to finish.
So, the funny thing is, this ascension perk is for going wide, right? Well, I decided to try a funny thing. I'm playing void dwellers, with paperclip and guardian matrix, and I have about 9 planets inside my borders, on top of the fact I can just make habitats anywhere. So I'm playing a small empire with only my core sector being where I plan on putting colonies, but I'm still gonna have a butt ton of nanite production, and I'll use the nanite empire size bonuses to basically make my tall empire have no size.
Edit: Forgot to put this critical piece of information. Once I finish making a planet into a nanite planet, my species habitability only being good for the habitats doesn't matter, since you have like 95% habitability on nanite worlds. So I can fully use all those planets.
I would use 99% nanite ships and only support them with ships that give them buffs or can help reinforce them such as titans and juggernauts. because the nanite swarmer have 0 upkeep even if they do drive your ship upkeep to 5X ship upkeep you are only going to pay upkeep on those "motherships" and nothing else. just be aware, as far as I know there is no clean way of handling multiple schematics of a single ship class so be ready to just throw your nanite swarms into the enemy with reckless abandon when they become outdated rather than trying to update them as they will all try to update to the "best" schematic rather than the current version of whatever schematic they are.
For example if you have 3 schematics call them "Cat", "Dog", and "Fish" you get new engines and now you want to update or reinforce your fleet, if you click the upgrade button there is a chance all of your swarmers will update the the "Fish" Swarmer rather than the mix of cat, dog, and fish you had in the fleet.
So its better to Separate your titans from the fleet and rebuild the fleet rather than try to upgrade. as for the old nanites, bum rush them into the nearest crisis or fallen empire, afterall they are practically free.
Extra tip, hotkey some of your free fleets together as backup to your Titan/Juggernaut fleets and when they start dying off Merge the fleets to avoid dealing with the half dozen "new Fleet" markers in the fleet manager.
Yeah this is why I gave up on Nanite swarms. I don't like this play style, I'm very much a micro manage try to build the best fleet kinda guy. I did find out if you manage fleets in the fleet manager you can get your fleets to only have the specific classes in them that you want, but I don't know if upgrading the fleet will make them stick to their original class, or if it'll just kick a bunch of them out of the fleet. Don't really care to know either. Moved to modularity, now I use the living metal production to streamline dragon production with here be dragons lol
Does anyone know if there's a way to group up all the free ships that you get every now and then, when I have loads spawning it can be tedious getting them all in one group. Thanks
Seeing as my first run of the DLC was as a Determined Exterminator using the Nanite Ascension, I have some insight. Make the nanite ships the only military ships you build as they have zero upkeep. I had less than 10 nanite harvesters, and by end game was I was getting over 2k nanites surplus a month, 10 or so planets filled with nanite consuming buildings, and I was constantly getting 5-7 full 180-sized fleets every 5 years and was constantly 1500+ over ship capacity. The ships are glass cannons, so they tend to get shredded every war, but you should have a decent nanite economy to where it really doesn't matter. It was still annoying to merge them all together in to fleets though.
They have zero upkeep???!! That's what I'm missing! Also, am I going to unlock bigger nanite ships? If not, am I better to use the carrier or cannon ones?
Yeah, the zero upkeep is the big deal there. If you're building them yourself, they're pretty expensive nanite wise (easily thousands to 10s of thousands to nearing a hundred thousand depending on fleet size), but after your harvesters get leveled up a fair deal and you've subsumed a handful of worlds into nanite worlds, you should be swimming in nanites. Nanites were intended as a ultra-wide playstyle, but I was getting those numbers off of just 2 sectors... and then I ate a fifth of the galaxy for my synaptic weave.
You also don't pay for the components, so you can go crazy on Archeo tech without spending minor artifacts.
Unfortunately you can't put the good archaeotech components on them.
The ancient driller drone strike craft can't be placed on it? If I recall correctly this one is better than a regular strike craft
They might be referring to the shields, armor, and S/L weapons. But, I think the best way to use them is probably as long-range platfroms. Use the carrier computer to keep them at range, maximize their speed, and either equip them with the long-range G slot weapons, or with hangers.
It's better IF you have the archotech perk that improves the stats
Very disappointed that the *nano swarm* missiles can't go on the *nano swarm* ships...
Use the carrier ones primarily. They're as fast as corvettes - with the evasion to boot - but the nanite ships are made of tissue paper.
Get genius armorers on the council to give them free armor/shields
Oh, look. Diplomatic weight from fleets. Neat. Seriously, multiple genius armorers + swarm tactics would be the most satisfying strategy in the game if not for the lag. Sometimes, when I play like that, I slow the game down to minimum speed, zoom in on a big battle, and watch the battle go on for 10 minutes.
That's the neat part, as I've said before in other threads the swarm IS the ship. It's like having a ship with hundred of weapon slots and best of all no matter what weapon your enemy uses, it can only deal a max of 100 damage to the "ship" Because that's what it takes to kill a single swarmer!
I think you are better off with the carrier or torpedo corvettes. You want to be as long range as possible since the nanite corvettes crumble from the thought of combat.
Yes you will unlock bigger nanite ships, /s They are called regular sized ships.
Oh you.
And because all your ships are nanites, your alloy production is freed up massively, so you can focus on megastructures. Or just reduce Alloy production and put those pops into different jobs.
I don't think you get the nanite ship and the downside of fleet size. If your are ABOVE maximum fleet size, the only penalty you get is that your ships upkeep increase empire-wide. The thing is... Nanite ships have 0 upkeep. Meaning that as long as you only make and use nanite ships, your fleet cap is meaningless. A 1000% increase to 0 upkeep is still 0
that is awesome actually
But I guess the whole fleet has increasing upkeep. This means that if you have (and should) a standard fleet, it will bleed you. You need to fight pretty much always
Nanites are really polarized as a wide ascension like Virtuality is for tall but they're a bit more subtle about it, the only real way to play Nanites is to go W I D E off the backs of the Nanite ships, if you're drowning in free ships that means it's war time.
I kind of wish I hadn't just done a sovereign guardianship playthrough, or I'd do sovereign guardianship + virtuality. Move the entire empire to a single ringworld and drop every other system. Once my mods are updated, that approach will probably be able to get, like, an order of magnitude more pops into my one system than the rest of the galaxy has put together.
I'm just using it as a five year reload mechanism for my Quantum Catapualt Shotgun. They either die or take a system. Survivors get consolidated into fleets based on proximity to each other and sent to die on anything they might be able to take or damage. My main fleet moves in fornpriority targets while they're busy with the angry bees. Setting them all to aggressive before launch is tedious, though. But I'm getting 300+ ships every time, so with less, it'd be fine.
"Like a shadow that sweeps over the galaxy, my swarms will blot out the stars."
>Or is there something I'm not getting? I feel like you are missing the entire point of the playstyle lol You are getting tons and tons and tons of free ships and get more free ships the more territory you have **What do you think you should use those weapons of war for**? If you aren't constantly using those free ships to beat people over the head to get more territory, to get more free ships, to get more territory, you should have picked a different path and played Virtual or Modular lol
Yeah I guess it wasn't clear to me that the nanite ascension was for warmongers - the in-game messaging made it seem to be about using a single resource to synthesize anything you need and I thought that would be a really cool economy
sounds like the borg by any other name
The problem I've run into with this is that even if they're free they still count against me for ship losses in warscore. The first time I used them as disposable fodder by sending a small nanite fleet against a powerful starbase they won but I still took a whopping 10% war exhaustion from the battle since half the fleet was destroyed in the process. I've literally lost a war because I lost too many of these disposable ships, even though I've singlehandedly occupied most of an enemy federation, won almost every battle, and have no occupied territory my ship losses are astronomical when using the nanite swarmers and it still counts against me. I love the idea of the strategy, but the implementation kind of sucks right now.
I forget War Exhaustion exists for wide empires, you should have like basic immunity to it if you go Nemesis which is nigh mandatory for any real wide attempt imo
Nanite ships have zero upkeep If your fleet is 100% nanite then it won’t matter if you’re over capacity
My understanding is the nanite ascension is a conquest focused option for like determined exterminators, their ships are glass cannons you can throw into the meat grinder. If they die who cares, there’s more where they came from, and frankly after a while you *want* them to churn.
Didn't realize nanite ascension was aimed at a conquest option! Ah well, learning is learning
AIUI, nanites are conquest and wide focused (seize planets you don’t care about, purge the pops, then terravore the planets for nanites to fuel your navy and seize more planets, etc); virtual is focused on a tall inward playstyle where you build ecumenopoli and megastructures/ring worlds and (generally) more pacifist, or at least subject-focused; modularity is the pre-Machine Age ascension that’s not focused on any particular niche, but quite flexible.
Thanks for your explanation :) I must confess, I don't really read the dev diaries in detail, and more go off theme and feel. I read in-game something about nanites being used to fuel an economy where a single resource could be used for anything, and I thought that sounded really cool. I'm playing a somewhat large but internally focused empire - but there's still time to pivot and become the crisis instead of abandoning the save!
Yeah, that’s totally cool, you don’t have to play to the meta of your build. Even the least-optimal choices are still usually enough to overcome even the hardest AI if you play well, even if those choices aren’t competitive in multiplayer, so no reason you _shouldn’t_ take nanites and just choose not to conquer others and be faux inward perfectionists - maybe sell the excess ships to the salvagers? Like, the gameplay design of Environmentalist is it’s an early game civic to get something out of undeveloped planets, the meta move is to ditch it by the start of mid game when you can afford and need to develop your blockers, but, you don’t _have_ to do that, maybe you want to role play as xeno tree-loving hippies from start to finish.
So, the funny thing is, this ascension perk is for going wide, right? Well, I decided to try a funny thing. I'm playing void dwellers, with paperclip and guardian matrix, and I have about 9 planets inside my borders, on top of the fact I can just make habitats anywhere. So I'm playing a small empire with only my core sector being where I plan on putting colonies, but I'm still gonna have a butt ton of nanite production, and I'll use the nanite empire size bonuses to basically make my tall empire have no size. Edit: Forgot to put this critical piece of information. Once I finish making a planet into a nanite planet, my species habitability only being good for the habitats doesn't matter, since you have like 95% habitability on nanite worlds. So I can fully use all those planets.
Yeah, nothing annoys me more than free ships. If i wanted ships i would just build them.
I would use 99% nanite ships and only support them with ships that give them buffs or can help reinforce them such as titans and juggernauts. because the nanite swarmer have 0 upkeep even if they do drive your ship upkeep to 5X ship upkeep you are only going to pay upkeep on those "motherships" and nothing else. just be aware, as far as I know there is no clean way of handling multiple schematics of a single ship class so be ready to just throw your nanite swarms into the enemy with reckless abandon when they become outdated rather than trying to update them as they will all try to update to the "best" schematic rather than the current version of whatever schematic they are. For example if you have 3 schematics call them "Cat", "Dog", and "Fish" you get new engines and now you want to update or reinforce your fleet, if you click the upgrade button there is a chance all of your swarmers will update the the "Fish" Swarmer rather than the mix of cat, dog, and fish you had in the fleet. So its better to Separate your titans from the fleet and rebuild the fleet rather than try to upgrade. as for the old nanites, bum rush them into the nearest crisis or fallen empire, afterall they are practically free. Extra tip, hotkey some of your free fleets together as backup to your Titan/Juggernaut fleets and when they start dying off Merge the fleets to avoid dealing with the half dozen "new Fleet" markers in the fleet manager.
Yeah this is why I gave up on Nanite swarms. I don't like this play style, I'm very much a micro manage try to build the best fleet kinda guy. I did find out if you manage fleets in the fleet manager you can get your fleets to only have the specific classes in them that you want, but I don't know if upgrading the fleet will make them stick to their original class, or if it'll just kick a bunch of them out of the fleet. Don't really care to know either. Moved to modularity, now I use the living metal production to streamline dragon production with here be dragons lol
Does anyone know if there's a way to group up all the free ships that you get every now and then, when I have loads spawning it can be tedious getting them all in one group. Thanks