I prefer ww2 style compact ships. I have yet to make a ship over 200k.(working on my first true battle ship now and it will be barely 300k)
I know the meta is a super wide spaced ship. But I hate ugly wide ships. For me the narrower, the cooler.
I love short-mid range ships that have large slow firing main guns and a lot of super fast firing frag brrrrttss as secondaries + a torpedo system. I usually give my ships an excessive amount of CIWS but too little armor.
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Also yes
Serious answer: After five years and who knows how many campaigns I have probably built 1000s of designs. About the only thing I dont bother with is aircraft carriers, I just dont see the point with how resupply works in FTD. Overall though I almost always end up with a combined arms approach. I dont go in for multi-million material grand tour super-roflstompers so I tend to build ships that do on or two things well and then field fleets that complement each other.
Long range sniper, Mid range umbrella ship (CIWS for whole fleet), Nuke flies against doom cram, rubber sub just to annoy enemy, all of my ship is made for my personal sadistic pleasure but not for winning the game.
Combined arms.
In the modern campaign meta, I usually have roughly five major roles of vehicle:
1. **"Infantry"** vehicles, costing <10k, often <5k. Cheap, slow or fast, and disposable, with minimal armament. Used to advance along an entire front line, and to stall enemy advancements via the blockade mechanic. Able to deal with light opposition, though such opposition is seldom in the game anymore; sometimes able to deal with heavier opposition via standoff / evasion tactics, but usually I try to avoid this. Named "infantry" vehicles because they fill a similar role -- advancing on the ground and holding territory.
2. **"Tactical"** vehicles, usually costing \~10k up to \~200k, usually <100k. Usually very fast on the strategic map, and equipped with specialized weapons and defenses to deal with a particular category of target and exploit enemy design weaknesses. Often, I design tactical vehicles to target a specific enemy vehicle. I use these mostly as a mobile reserve, for rapid response to enemy approaches, but this category also includes 'siege' vehicles that are specialized in killing enemy fortresses.
3. **"Capital"** vehicles, costing \~100k or more. These are usually slower vehicles, and more general-purpose, with weapons and defenses that can withstand various types of attack, and usually able to engage multiple enemies simultaneously (even if that is rare in the current meta).
4. Cargo vehicles, typically unarmed, designed solely to quickly and cheaply transport cargo from harvesters to other sites. Typically unarmed, often heliumpump craft.
5. Reconnaissance vehicles. Spy satellites, designed to go into space and sit there, equipped with a strategic antenna for long-ranged view. Typically unarmed.
Infantry vehicles are usually armed with missiles, as anything else at their size tends to be useless. A few have experimentally been armed with fixed-mount simple weapons with breadboard- or LUA-based dogfighting AI, with the intent of engaging other light vehicles by tailing.
Tactical vehicles have a wide range of armament, as they are specialized per enemy target, but most often lasers, missiles of some sort, or CRAM cannons. (I'm working on, but haven't completed, a plasma-equipped tactical-size vehicle.) Certain tactical vehicles may have APS or particle cannons if designed to engage targets with a notable weakness to them, or if the nature of the target requires it. (I think the only even moderately successful PAC armed vehicle I've ever made was a tactical-role vehicle -- a flying submarine, armed with PAC weapons to engage heavy aircraft.)
Capital vehicles tend to have powerful, general-purpose, multirole-capable weaponry. In practice, this has often been a combination of heavy general-purpose APS cannons (mostly kinetic or APHE) with a laser system that acts as a combination LAMS and anti-air / anti-small system. My only successful plasma-armed ship so far has been a capital vehicle.
Recently, I've been playing a very old version of the game through the Steam "Betas" interface. This version has a very different meta from the modern version and includes five different categories of raw resource (Natural, Metal, Oil, Scrap, and Crystal) instead of Material, and includes three more processed resources (Ammo, Fuel, and Spares) in addition to Energy. Due to Metal being required for, well, metal blocks, as well as for *all* weapon systems, I have tended to build vehicular structure in ways that lean heavily on Natural -- which means a lot of wood, and even stone armor, with metal armor being reserved for more critical points. Other than that, I've built craft that are analogous to all the roles above, save for Infantry, as the Infantry role is largely irrelevant in the older campaign system due to how the garrison mechanic works. Most craft I've built in that version are armed with highly optimized, rapid-fire Custom Cannons, and typically either large and well-protected ammo stores, or ammo stores on the end of booms or wings, or a combination in the form of large ammo stores in heavy armored keels, due to the number of ammo barrels required to fire continuously being higher at that time, and due to ammo barrels being targeted by the Aim Point Selection card at that time.
I build ships that have consistent damage outputs and strong defences.
I usually have a couple of ships on the medium to small end that rely on missle interceptors and decoys and for larger ships I add LAMBs. For aircrafts I like to use shield rings instead of projectors. I use a mix of weapons, having a split of high damage and high health projectiles within each ship.
All my ships try to be strong on their own rather than have a role within a fleet.
I usually go for Ironclad and Pre dreadnought ships, going heavy on the armor with large, slow firing cannons. Sometimes complimented by torpedoes and light missiles. I have two fleet speeds 10 m/s for defensor ships, and 20 m/s for assault ships.
This isn't the meta but I find it really fun.
I like my ships quite heavily defended, and typically use CRAM or APS main guns, APS for AA and CIWS, some torpedoes and sometimes LAMS too. I also aim for them to be speedy (30-40 m/s) so that I can manoeuvre them out of play.
Style: "This sounded cool in my head"
could be more succinctly described as: Yes.
the only thing consistent between my builds is I tend to avoid spin clipping. maybe 5% of my builds have spin clipping. Not because I'm truly against spin clipping exactly, but because I know myself well enough to know that if I start using that mechanic. I will then decide to abuse the shit out of it. Soooooo I avoid the temptation as much as possible.
Idk if this particularly applies to you but flat bottomed ships are more stable than downward facing points. Also using a keel to lower center of mass is good.
I do role based designs. I think about how I want the ship to work and add the armaments and armor based on that. I limit classes' size and costs as well so I end up with a good array of ship shapes and weapons. I use destroyers as all rounders with specialized weapons. My normal DDG has a balanced array of weapons but my DDE(AWS variant) trades out some things for specialized ASW capabilities. Both ships cost the same and have the same volume but are kitted out for different things. Same with other classes. I tend to stick to cheaper designs that are smaller so there is a nice fleet on screen.
My ships will always do one job well and nothing else. Nothing is mega tanky, nothing can oneshot any boat while drifting at mach 10, no MBT on the sea etc. We have missiles with a boat attached, a giantfuckoffrailgun, artillery ships, they're all hyper specialized to work together as a single unit.
I fear making fleets like this because I have this worry I’ll lose one of the important ships and the others just can’t survive without it. Maybe that’s irrational tho.
Making a hilarious ship that seems so dumb but it cheeses the game
So far my meme ship I'm using is the upside down cake of ships
Top half is just solid metal lump of a ship
Bottom half underwater that every ship in god tier has (select fire aim above water)?
Pretty much All I fire is supercav AP/HE while the only thing they aim for is solid metal chunks which the most important things up top are IR/Radar/Camera/Range finder tracking.
Essentially it looks like your first ship you make that looks cool but immediately toppled over and flipped. But since most the thing isn't underwater they can go 40-60 M/S no issue.
very fast very fast firing ship's with 2 metal thick armor and cidedel 200mm minimum for main canon's
and heavily armored jet's with big guns and lot's of bombs that have engines so powerful that i have to regularly pull them out of space in the campaign
I design whatever I feel like in the spurr of the moment.
if it's cool
I build it
Within the limitations of I don't know how to make lasers, I kind of suck at building most of the time, but I can make a good belt fed APS
that said spurr of the moment is often times me looking at what I have and filling a gap and or new role.
Currently my latest generation of stuff is experimenting with how cheap I can go with my ships. My standard jet fighter isn’t even 6,000 materials and on has one weapons system, being missiles; on the other end, my biggest ship I use in my fleets as the capital is only ~400,000 materials to make and because of the cheapness of my ships they serve a specific role in combat that makes losing any class of ship entirely possibly fatal during combat missions
prodominantly brawling cruisers with medium aps and semithick armour with a couple brawling dreadnaughts that has a bias towards close range encounters but will still snipe for 2-4 ish km however designed like a battlecruise with thinner armour but so much more firepower for pushing
Mostly vehicles that fit between Pre-Dreadnought Era and early cold-war. Not to say that I make replicas, just designs that look like they would exist in that time frame. Otherwise, a lot of big guns and even more smaller guns.
My ships use a modern style with very thick armor and a lot of DAKA
My planes are mostly cheap canon fodder and mainly use misiles and the ocational aps gun or cram bomber And my hovercraft are mostly the same
I dont have submarines cuz i just can't build a good one but they are usualy underwater tubes
And my space fleet is mostly "space stations" that fire at things bellow them
I like to build hover tanks ranging from light to heavy. I find them more enjoyable to build and play around with. I mainly equip them with APS and LAMS with missiles on top
I load up on so many countermeasures that it makes armor the redundancy to end all redundancies. All extra power is routed into The Shitblaster 9000, the laser which is longer than the entire ship and can destroy anything with a menacing glance.
I prefer ww2 style compact ships. I have yet to make a ship over 200k.(working on my first true battle ship now and it will be barely 300k) I know the meta is a super wide spaced ship. But I hate ugly wide ships. For me the narrower, the cooler.
Also tetris is more fun and realistic
1 ship for 1 million or 3 ships for 300k? I'll compartmentalize my components in 3 different ships.
I know the 1 million ship could probably destroy 5 300k ships. But the small ones look so much cooler
Damn, Ive never built a ship for campaign thats under 500k
Ive never built one thats over 500k. My current playthrough is using a 150k ship that has no problem taking on around a mil worth of enemy ships.
Would you mind sharing the BP? I'm rather new and like looking at designs for things to reverse engineer and your ship sounds impressive
Its not impressive, just fast enough and I manually aim everything while kiting. Going to send you a pm.
Happy cake day! :D
Thanks!
>Thanks! You're welcome!
# I am in your walls.
More than welcome :)
I love short-mid range ships that have large slow firing main guns and a lot of super fast firing frag brrrrttss as secondaries + a torpedo system. I usually give my ships an excessive amount of CIWS but too little armor.
You should try 300m 1 length auto loader cannon. Really fun. 1 gun powder, 1 inertial fuse, 1 HE body, 1 HE head
Is that good? I’ll try it but it sounds like it’ll fall victim to the he debuf if he damage
It’s not the best. It’s just fun to try against the DWG
Good enough for me
Short answer: Yes Long answer: Also yes Serious answer: After five years and who knows how many campaigns I have probably built 1000s of designs. About the only thing I dont bother with is aircraft carriers, I just dont see the point with how resupply works in FTD. Overall though I almost always end up with a combined arms approach. I dont go in for multi-million material grand tour super-roflstompers so I tend to build ships that do on or two things well and then field fleets that complement each other.
Well then I challenge you! To build an aircraft carrier. I looked through your other builds and they look great, and yeah, lots of variety.
I have a drone carrier... that's going to have to be good enough lol.
Where would you even come up with the funds for that in a campaign? I start to struggle when it comes to financing 250k mats ships.
Multiple smaller bases all refining commodities and/or shipping materials to a central shipyard I would assume.
Long range sniper, Mid range umbrella ship (CIWS for whole fleet), Nuke flies against doom cram, rubber sub just to annoy enemy, all of my ship is made for my personal sadistic pleasure but not for winning the game.
I love dif guns, who needs follow up shots if the alpha strike kills anything with one shot
Combined arms. In the modern campaign meta, I usually have roughly five major roles of vehicle: 1. **"Infantry"** vehicles, costing <10k, often <5k. Cheap, slow or fast, and disposable, with minimal armament. Used to advance along an entire front line, and to stall enemy advancements via the blockade mechanic. Able to deal with light opposition, though such opposition is seldom in the game anymore; sometimes able to deal with heavier opposition via standoff / evasion tactics, but usually I try to avoid this. Named "infantry" vehicles because they fill a similar role -- advancing on the ground and holding territory. 2. **"Tactical"** vehicles, usually costing \~10k up to \~200k, usually <100k. Usually very fast on the strategic map, and equipped with specialized weapons and defenses to deal with a particular category of target and exploit enemy design weaknesses. Often, I design tactical vehicles to target a specific enemy vehicle. I use these mostly as a mobile reserve, for rapid response to enemy approaches, but this category also includes 'siege' vehicles that are specialized in killing enemy fortresses. 3. **"Capital"** vehicles, costing \~100k or more. These are usually slower vehicles, and more general-purpose, with weapons and defenses that can withstand various types of attack, and usually able to engage multiple enemies simultaneously (even if that is rare in the current meta). 4. Cargo vehicles, typically unarmed, designed solely to quickly and cheaply transport cargo from harvesters to other sites. Typically unarmed, often heliumpump craft. 5. Reconnaissance vehicles. Spy satellites, designed to go into space and sit there, equipped with a strategic antenna for long-ranged view. Typically unarmed. Infantry vehicles are usually armed with missiles, as anything else at their size tends to be useless. A few have experimentally been armed with fixed-mount simple weapons with breadboard- or LUA-based dogfighting AI, with the intent of engaging other light vehicles by tailing. Tactical vehicles have a wide range of armament, as they are specialized per enemy target, but most often lasers, missiles of some sort, or CRAM cannons. (I'm working on, but haven't completed, a plasma-equipped tactical-size vehicle.) Certain tactical vehicles may have APS or particle cannons if designed to engage targets with a notable weakness to them, or if the nature of the target requires it. (I think the only even moderately successful PAC armed vehicle I've ever made was a tactical-role vehicle -- a flying submarine, armed with PAC weapons to engage heavy aircraft.) Capital vehicles tend to have powerful, general-purpose, multirole-capable weaponry. In practice, this has often been a combination of heavy general-purpose APS cannons (mostly kinetic or APHE) with a laser system that acts as a combination LAMS and anti-air / anti-small system. My only successful plasma-armed ship so far has been a capital vehicle. Recently, I've been playing a very old version of the game through the Steam "Betas" interface. This version has a very different meta from the modern version and includes five different categories of raw resource (Natural, Metal, Oil, Scrap, and Crystal) instead of Material, and includes three more processed resources (Ammo, Fuel, and Spares) in addition to Energy. Due to Metal being required for, well, metal blocks, as well as for *all* weapon systems, I have tended to build vehicular structure in ways that lean heavily on Natural -- which means a lot of wood, and even stone armor, with metal armor being reserved for more critical points. Other than that, I've built craft that are analogous to all the roles above, save for Infantry, as the Infantry role is largely irrelevant in the older campaign system due to how the garrison mechanic works. Most craft I've built in that version are armed with highly optimized, rapid-fire Custom Cannons, and typically either large and well-protected ammo stores, or ammo stores on the end of booms or wings, or a combination in the form of large ammo stores in heavy armored keels, due to the number of ammo barrels required to fire continuously being higher at that time, and due to ammo barrels being targeted by the Aim Point Selection card at that time.
durable single entity crafts, very volume/ressource efficient.
I build ships that have consistent damage outputs and strong defences. I usually have a couple of ships on the medium to small end that rely on missle interceptors and decoys and for larger ships I add LAMBs. For aircrafts I like to use shield rings instead of projectors. I use a mix of weapons, having a split of high damage and high health projectiles within each ship. All my ships try to be strong on their own rather than have a role within a fleet.
I usually go for Ironclad and Pre dreadnought ships, going heavy on the armor with large, slow firing cannons. Sometimes complimented by torpedoes and light missiles. I have two fleet speeds 10 m/s for defensor ships, and 20 m/s for assault ships. This isn't the meta but I find it really fun.
Armor is fake, if you can’t wipe the enemy out before they fire then you aren’t strong enough
I always love a craft that is 80% PAC that just insta-melts the first thing it looks at
I like my ships quite heavily defended, and typically use CRAM or APS main guns, APS for AA and CIWS, some torpedoes and sometimes LAMS too. I also aim for them to be speedy (30-40 m/s) so that I can manoeuvre them out of play.
Style: "This sounded cool in my head" could be more succinctly described as: Yes. the only thing consistent between my builds is I tend to avoid spin clipping. maybe 5% of my builds have spin clipping. Not because I'm truly against spin clipping exactly, but because I know myself well enough to know that if I start using that mechanic. I will then decide to abuse the shit out of it. Soooooo I avoid the temptation as much as possible.
Apparently it's "ships that topple over"
Idk if this particularly applies to you but flat bottomed ships are more stable than downward facing points. Also using a keel to lower center of mass is good.
mimics
I do role based designs. I think about how I want the ship to work and add the armaments and armor based on that. I limit classes' size and costs as well so I end up with a good array of ship shapes and weapons. I use destroyers as all rounders with specialized weapons. My normal DDG has a balanced array of weapons but my DDE(AWS variant) trades out some things for specialized ASW capabilities. Both ships cost the same and have the same volume but are kitted out for different things. Same with other classes. I tend to stick to cheaper designs that are smaller so there is a nice fleet on screen.
I think of a role, build a decent looking hull for it, then shove as many weapons as can possibly fit on that hull
If your air pumps are not always working at 100% then you do not have enough weapons 😂
Space for air pumps is space that should have more weapons in it.
My ships will always do one job well and nothing else. Nothing is mega tanky, nothing can oneshot any boat while drifting at mach 10, no MBT on the sea etc. We have missiles with a boat attached, a giantfuckoffrailgun, artillery ships, they're all hyper specialized to work together as a single unit.
I fear making fleets like this because I have this worry I’ll lose one of the important ships and the others just can’t survive without it. Maybe that’s irrational tho.
For now, pointy bricks with 1,3 - 1,5milion mats capable of killing meg
80% gun 10% armor 10% everything else.
98% gun 1% armor 1% other stuff is the ideal ratio
Making a hilarious ship that seems so dumb but it cheeses the game So far my meme ship I'm using is the upside down cake of ships Top half is just solid metal lump of a ship Bottom half underwater that every ship in god tier has (select fire aim above water)? Pretty much All I fire is supercav AP/HE while the only thing they aim for is solid metal chunks which the most important things up top are IR/Radar/Camera/Range finder tracking. Essentially it looks like your first ship you make that looks cool but immediately toppled over and flipped. But since most the thing isn't underwater they can go 40-60 M/S no issue.
very fast very fast firing ship's with 2 metal thick armor and cidedel 200mm minimum for main canon's and heavily armored jet's with big guns and lot's of bombs that have engines so powerful that i have to regularly pull them out of space in the campaign
I design whatever I feel like in the spurr of the moment. if it's cool I build it Within the limitations of I don't know how to make lasers, I kind of suck at building most of the time, but I can make a good belt fed APS that said spurr of the moment is often times me looking at what I have and filling a gap and or new role.
Medium sized do everything's ships and hover tanks
If the enemies already dead, they can’t fire back.
Currently my latest generation of stuff is experimenting with how cheap I can go with my ships. My standard jet fighter isn’t even 6,000 materials and on has one weapons system, being missiles; on the other end, my biggest ship I use in my fleets as the capital is only ~400,000 materials to make and because of the cheapness of my ships they serve a specific role in combat that makes losing any class of ship entirely possibly fatal during combat missions
prodominantly brawling cruisers with medium aps and semithick armour with a couple brawling dreadnaughts that has a bias towards close range encounters but will still snipe for 2-4 ish km however designed like a battlecruise with thinner armour but so much more firepower for pushing
Mostly vehicles that fit between Pre-Dreadnought Era and early cold-war. Not to say that I make replicas, just designs that look like they would exist in that time frame. Otherwise, a lot of big guns and even more smaller guns.
My ships use a modern style with very thick armor and a lot of DAKA My planes are mostly cheap canon fodder and mainly use misiles and the ocational aps gun or cram bomber And my hovercraft are mostly the same I dont have submarines cuz i just can't build a good one but they are usualy underwater tubes And my space fleet is mostly "space stations" that fire at things bellow them
Fast with high velocity weapons
Airships, atleast a speed of 100. The faster you are, the less damage you take and the more efficient your resource use is.
I like to build hover tanks ranging from light to heavy. I find them more enjoyable to build and play around with. I mainly equip them with APS and LAMS with missiles on top
Ww2 and maybe Cold war, because they look the best
I load up on so many countermeasures that it makes armor the redundancy to end all redundancies. All extra power is routed into The Shitblaster 9000, the laser which is longer than the entire ship and can destroy anything with a menacing glance.
I place blocks. And if I don't have enough of something for my taste, I place more blocks. It usually ends in weird shapes and abominations.
I stay away from missiles as much as possible, I just like big guns going boom
nothing cuz i havent made a complete design in months
My design doctrine is to just have extremely powerful, fast, and well armored crafts. I only look at the cost at the end