Now hear me out, I must defend the Orbital Trash Disposal. It should be ranked higher just because the satisfaction one gets knowing you are transforming their planet into a global San Francisco.

Maybe the best defense is the xenos we purged along the way

Dude, you are a guiding light. These lists are S Tier content.

If you become the crisis and stay at tier four all of your ships from cruisers down except the frigate cost only a static amount of minerals that never changes no matter what you put on your ships. This reduces special resource cost for your fleets to a stupid amount thus allowing you to field really whatever you want without killing the bank.

please do a fleet composition video please. These vids you make are most excellent, now you must teach us more.

The best defence is a good offence, the enemy fleet can't harm your fleet if its dead

Admiral Montu, the galactic imperium will take your advice too hart

26:14 I think this can be great on Titans or Jaugernauts! You don't build many of them, and can get 100% shield hardening while leaving A slots for other things.

It's worth noting that a Colosus can refit itself, so you can design it with a generally useful aura, and then refit it in a few weeks during a war - you don't have to "guess" that a niche aura would be useful when you build it.

Thanks for this video! I had been struggling to get my defensive set up right, and this really helps!

Fantastic! I have been waiting for this. Trying to figure out what was better - various plating, hardeners, capacitors etc was driving me nuts.

It's important to note that Artillery combat computers cause issues with X slot weapons. The ship will turn around and no longer shoot at hostiles, which can lead to a very frustrating battle.

I just auto upgrade all my ships, had no idea people had metas for this

Thank you for the in-depth breakdown on each component. Very helpful

Thanks again! Love your vids :) You're not only teaching me (e.g.) which defenses are best, but you're also teaching me how to think about the game in a more holistic sense, which I appreciate.

41:40 secret callout! I've been watching your content for a year and you've made me enjoy stellaris so much more with your helpful videos!

Thank you for this List. Your arguments are fair and understandable.

I couldn't thank you enough for videos like this! I've been playing since the very first versions but took some time off, so this is helpful. Especially about how shields and armor has changed, I remember it being the complete opposite lol

Thank you for these vids, please keep investing the time in making them

Watched the whole thing. You broke down all the changes in an efficient manner. Thanks for all your hard work!

This made me really think about my ship builds. Watched all the way through

Shield Caps are nice against Crises that optimise shield-only fleets.

Thank you Montuwu 😘

Interesting data, had a few points I had missed. Well played.

Danke für deine Videos. Du sprichst einen für mich leicht verständlichen Dialekt so dass ich die volle Länge überstehen kann. Liebe!

i love these videos! one thing i would like to see is a ranking for early/mid/late game

Made it to the secret callout! Thanks for your hard work Montu

Onemkre tier list watched. I would have never played this game without you, thanks !

38:20 I very definitely listened to the whole video. Yep, I agree with the stuff that was said earlier in the video and know all about it. When you said that thing about the stuff in B tier it was very insightful. I did leave a like as well

Secret callout unlocked. Thanks for this list Montu, that really helps! ^^

I watched the whole thing, got dinner ready and watched. Hoping to see what your fleets look like since that old video from a couple years ago.

The last icon in the B tier doesn't light up - the second to last lights up twice.

41:40 Secret callout! I really appreciate these videos. Even with 2k hours in the game it can be difficult to analyze some of the games mechanics and how they interact with one another. Thanks for putting in the work and providing such great info.

Small points for ancient suspension fields and other good archaeo-tech modules: they're excellent for juggernauts. You can get 100% shield and armor hardening on it with that build which makes them a pain to kill. And since you can only build 1* the minor artifact cost is not a problem really. *GDF and federations can also have juggernauts, but that's still only a maximum of 3 so the point still stands

Thank you so much, you literally taught me how to play this game!

@montu re "Chance to hit" - if the formula I saw is correct, I think you're mistaken about it's lack of usefulness. The formula I saw was: `total chance = (accuracy - (evasion - tracking)) + chance to hit` (with some clamping added to avoid any intermediate result go outside 0-100). in other words, it's still helpful even if you have 100% accuracy, as it can make up for lack of tracking. e.g. 100% accuracy + 10% tracking + 10 chance to hit vs 50 evasion would yield a total chance of 70% vs. 60% without the +10 chance to hit.

Watched till the call out :)

i think the best use of cloaking in combat is to get past empires your not at war with who may be in the way of an empire you are at war with.. (for me this usually happens if my enemy was cut in half by another empire and only part of their territory is reachable from my territory. jumpdrives dont always reach across the territory so i grab a few cloaked fleets to strike the seperated systems)

Secret callout, love these tier lists

Thank you Montu for this List.. i usually dont ever change the combat computers of my ships for everything smaller than cruiser :D gotta have to think about that... now it would be really cool if you could combine this video and the weapons tier list and show some blueprints of ship designs...

Watched it all and love your channel. Any plans to add in Console Addition guides?

"if you go on long range mission and won't be able to repair" So most wars and crisis battles XD

As a new player I really appreciate your videos. Bravo!

I prefer shields over armor for several reasons. 1) Shields are cheaper with Alloy cost as the Strategic resources are peanuts. So can field more ships at less cost. 2) The hardening items help negate some of the shield penetrating weapons damage. With 3 of them you can get 75% shield hardening and if you get Leader with the +20% hardening trait(forget name) you'll effectively have 95% hardening. 3) Repeatables is the key. In Physics you have only 4 repeatable which are 2 for energy weapons, 1 energy production, and 1 for shield HP. I don't tend to use energy weapons and my economy doesn't need better technician energy production. The result is repeatable shield continuously once I get to the endgame. My ships after all the modifiers often have more HP in shields than any AI empire in their combined Hull/Armor/Shield HP. Even rival some of the 25x Crisis fleets in HP. Where as armor is Engineering which has to split it's time on repeatables with Kinetic and Explosive weapons depending on which I'm going for. Also can often run into Mineral shortages so might do a few repeatables on miner production depending on how my economy is going. Meanwhile Fighters repeatable is in the Social tech line which also doesn't have much else competing for it's attention which I why my ships tend to be heavily shielded carriers. I still use some slots for armor as there is power limitations but overall because of the repeatable even on ships that have half armor and half shields slots the total amount of shield HP on the ship is often larger and only grows more so as the game progresses with repeatable to the point in one game I had well over double the shields HP on a ship that was half and half in terms of modules.

The reactor boosters are a godsend in the early game if my reactor tech is behind my weaponry tech and I have a strong alloy economy. Or maybe I'm just OCD and don't want frankenships with older tech components to save on power generation. Also, here's a scenario where orbital bombardment damage increases might be worthwhile - if you create a series of small fleets with orbital bombardment specialization, you could speed up the rate at which you exterminate all pops of multiple worlds at once if you wanted to turn them into fresh tomb worlds.

Oh I'm watching all right. its intesting to see how this has shifted so much from the past.

Shield Generators are actually good on Juggernauts, because they have a big base amount of shielding (10000 or something iirc). And they have so much power, that you can get quite a bit of mileage out of +10% Shielding. (With 100% Shield Hardening from Largen Ancient Suspension Fields it is basically unkillable.)

Thank you Montu

The best defensive system setup I've gotten was an early game worm in a checkpoint system. Combine that with a citadel armed to the teeth along with all of the black holes in the system, and it becomes a death trap that enemy fleets cannot escape from. And that's even assuming they dare to attack you, unless the system is also in a conventiently placed nebula.

What do you feel about pairing pulse armor with MINOR shield hardening? Such as putting up one suspension field or putting up a single Hardener? If your percentage of armor + hit points is roughly inverse to the shield strength that would be the appropriate amount to maximize efficiency with minimal input. But that is getting into deep theory crafting and putting much more thought into it than a simple review would be and would legitimately be a short video on it's own to discuss that effectively I imagine.

For titan auras, I generally run three different titan builds with the shield, fire rate, and disengagement modules and then put each in a fleet and have those three fleets fly around as a battle group. Only late game obv but gives me tons of flexibility in each of my battle groups and also makes for a wicked combo on enemy fleets

Hey Montu, any chance we will get an updated meta fleet guide any time soon?

Secret Callout! Thanks for the updates. The games as a service makes your videos essentiell. Other older strategy games that i used to play one playthrough every year- like Pax Imperia or Civilization series- you could use the strategy from previous runs and know they worked. With Stellaris that's not the case. Every patch turn some mechanic upside down. I like both approaches but its a bit negative when you dont touch the game for 1-2 years. Also a question that has been on my mind the last days. Has the best version of Stellaris already been? (Overall balance and fun)

Has anyone ever tested how boosts from things like the trash module interact with reductions from things like the Unyielding tree? It might possibly have some niche use bombarding planets with the max 98% bombardment reduction.

Watched it all of course :)

The perfect way to start my weekend shift at work

you should do a video on design from menacing ships. also, gonna ask, but a video on NSC2 (or 3 when it releases) could be cool.

Somehow this lizard makes me press the like button

Auxiliary Fire Control being that high is WILD.

41 mins , wow time flew by

I have found that crisis fleets b line for nearby military fleets. So if you cloak you can easily avoid unwanted conflict when trying to snipe crisis stations or unbidden anchors.

Time for another series of ship building videos.

Thank you

I find the only time i seriously use line combat computers is when i use a full neutron build to melt the scourge. I feel like the line ship should have been slightly higher but it is understandable that it isnt that strong.

I would love to see how you would design psionic ascended empire's ships with a shield focus on all the variants of ships.

I think it's important to note that only a few weapons actually have armor penetration, notably strike craft and some missiles. Therefore I'd personally rank the reactive armor lower, as it's an auxiliary slot with a pretty good but niche use.

Made it to the callout, maybe a tweaking of things is in order again. Would be interesting to see different bonuses or negatives on different things. Maybe armor reduces speed or evasion, hull has no such problems and energy requirements adjusted so that ship design is more thoughtful. Possibly include a “one of a kind” slot style so that multiple afterburners isnt the only thing to do early. I feel if things had real impacts (energy wepoms costing less alloys but sign more energy, fighters increasing time to jump away, just lots of small tweaks around the edges to freshen up the Armor is stonks meta we now have. 2 cents

Not sure if you mentioned it, but shields do have the advantage over armour if you are in a fast-paced war, as the shield will recover in a few days, whereas the armour and hull take a month and the fleet must remain idle at a friendly starbase. I know that recently captured starbases and outposts repair, but that is only after a bit (a month?), but if you need to keep moving, you can end up with ships that are low armour and hull running into fresh fleets. kind wish that you had to go to a friendly starbase to repair fleets, rather than outposts, or that shipyards increased the speed of repair. it would force the players to have to consider their wars a little more

My only major comment is that Armor Hardening isn't really S-tier, because there's so little that penetrates armor that you don't really need it. A single advanced module will protect you from Disruptors well enough, and you can use an auxiliary module slot to get around the lack of regeneration. Similarly, Shield Hardeners should be a tier A, simply because there are more weapons systems that ignore shields. Armor is effective against missiles and fighters out of the box, so unless you're fighting the Unbidden, it's just better. For shields to really be worth it, they need a couple of buffs - reduce the power consumption and give a small innate degree of hardening to all shields that increases with tech, but still requires a Shield Hardener or two to really max out. Shield Hardening also needs to reduce Shield Nullification, so Pulsars and Zroni Storm Casters can be countered instead of turning your defenses off like a light switch. As it stands, the only larger hulls - Cruisers and larger - have the slots to make use of shields and the Shield Hardeners they need to actually function, and that still requires some archaeotech so you can use Shield slots for the extra 15% hardening. But if you replace those slots with Armor, an armor regen module, and a single advanced armor hardener, you're probably better off, and with a lot less hassle.

I think the problem with the mark of the whisperer is that by the point you have it, you ate already able to get 90% evasion corvettes without using any A slot at all, so it's pretty much useless, especially compared to normal afterburners who at least add speed

26:33 For shield hardening you don't need that much, as long as most of the shields are gone before the hull breaks it does not matter.

I watched until the secret callout! Interesting how some of the things have pretty much inversed on this tier list. Also, never expected juggernaut's strike craft aura to be so high here, is strike craft speed actually so good?

Could you do a play-through so we can see how you build up your colonies and build your ships? The videos are very informative but I don't see any recent playthroughs.

I would put Munitions plant in C because you can swap to it when you need to, also bonus orbital damage actually increases the cap of the amount of orbital damage does, not get quicker to the max amount Say 100 naval cap deals 1% each day With +30% it will deal instead 1.3% The cap is 3.3333 from just having 100 naval cap, so with this 30% bonus you deal a whole 3.33*1.3=4.333

can going over 100% chance to hit negate some of the enemies evasion? eg you are vs 90% evasion corvettes and have excess accuracy of lets say total of 110% would you then have a 20% accuracy vs the corvettes? or just the 10% because that excess accuracy was just lost?

Have you thought about the damage boost cloaking devices get during cooldown? Edit: It is not shown in the ingame tooltips. Did they remove it in one of the last patches?

I love to play around with cloaking, to fly your 2nd fleet around a other fleet and drop out cloak and hit em in the back is just the best, just have to not decloak a mega swarm of corvettes (800+) at the same time on top a other mega cluster of ships, as it always crash my PC :)

I find picket useful for my destroyers to screen for my line, the stats are just a bonus.

41:40 secret callout, been watching you for a long time Montu :) First comment I think though.

Yep absolutely watched all the way to the 41minute mark

I wonder how well the auto ship builder is

I haven't played for a few xpacs. If you become the crisis, does it still remove all resoucrce costs to build ships besides minerals. I am looking specifically at ancient weapons. Would they still cost artificacts on a crisis ship? Edit: They do not, handy.

+1 for the office reference "turn tables"

I did not realise the crisis strength bonuses were ignored in terms of reductions.

Would one trash disposer in a fleet be enough to apply the bonus or is the damage calculated for each ship?

Orbital bombardment has some place, just not something you want on the main attack fleet. To get the most out of it, simply create a small fleet that dedicates itself to 'scouring of worlds,' and have it tag behind the main fleet. No longer do you need to park the main fleet to weaken a world for your armies, they can move on to the next target while your dedicated Orbital Bombardment team mops up.... Of course, obsolete once you get assimilate nanites and all become .... me.

Those who shoot first, often shoot last.

25:20 Funny thing that, I don't know if they changed it in 3.9, but in 3.8 I had thought it worked the way you described it here too - that archeotech ascension increased it by 60%. I don't know where in the line of communication of the devs or the fans the error occurred here, but it's not a 60% increase. The tooltip in the timestamp says +750 and then +450 from the perk. This is in fact not 1200 as if you added it up, but is a total of +750, since the +450 was already added to it. Without the ascension perk it's +300 or so, and if you play around and add/remove the armor ingame, you can confirm this via total shield value changes. The wiki page says 60% increase probably because the author thought the 450 was the 60% increase on top of the base value of 750. Since we can obviously tell without complicated math that a +450 increase from 300 shield value is not a "60%" increase. So it's not "the same power requirement as a hyper shield for nearly the same shield" , it's "the same power requirement as a hyper shield for around 60% the value".

Yes i did watch all of it

Yep, watched this all the way through. I love making ships loaded with whirlwind missiles and fighters, running long-range computers with tons of afterburners. The AI has a hard time doing anything about that at times! :)

Still watching!

Laughed at shield apologist. Enjoyed the rest of the video 👌

I thought the chances to evade increases the number of rolls the game does to see if you evade, working like advantage in D&D. Combined with evasion buffs, that actually is kinda ridiculous amount of increasing to your evasion, because it effectively forces the enemy to reroll 5 more times against your evasion. It becomes way better the more evasion you have. However I don't know if that's how it actually works.

Following the shoutout... I always forget that 'chance to hit' and 'accuracy' are the same thing. Ty for reminding me...

Oh how the turn tables 😅

I really wish there were these types of videos for stellaris console edition

As a brand new player, I am proud of myself for disregarding the Crystal Infused Plates in my most recent game. They just didn’t really give me the protection I wanted and I had alloys to spare on Armor

If you're playing a high crisis run it's more beneficial to stay in advanced combat computer until The Contingency is defeated.

Maybe they should change crystal infused plating to and auxiliary % gain buff these days

I've played Stellaris since release and to be perfectly honest I can't ever remember a time when shields were good. I've always had some but never more than two slots. I'm not even sure what could be done to make shields better as they represent a dual opportunity cost, the slot they use is better taken up by armor and the power they consume is less power for weapons.