Best Attack Ship

This design is non-existent in the B5W mod...so I bet a fully loaded Shadow Cruiser can mop up the floor with it...if it could exist in the mod.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

The best way to counter this (or any) ship is to make his component selection wasteful. Use the combat space simulator to test your designs.

He has 2 x PD ... Therefore missiles/torpedoes are of limited usefulness. Use his design and tweak it to be better.

He has emissive armor, check to see how many damage points it ignores, your weapons MUST put out more then that.

He has phased shields, so a shield depleter might be a good selection.

You should have more movement, so I'd suggest spending 20kt for a solar sail + quantums.

In tit-for-tat encounters you need AT LEAST 1 weapon exactly like his, or better if you want to win.

Try shard cannons (crystal tech) as they ignore armor.

Use organic armor (organic tech)as it regenerates during battle.

You do NOT need phased shields so that will save some resources, but I would use a shield regenerator.

Null spece projectors. Medium range, ignores shields and armor.

Make sure you have sufficient shielding and PDs to withstand the initial onslaugt as you close into your weapon's range. One good volley will trash his innards and its all over.

Offensive power doesn't mean much if a ship can't take what it can dish out, and this ship looks like it can do both.
I really like that ship, except for all the weight wasted on emissive armor.

750mt?
Don't you mean 750kt?
But that can't be right, you have 850kt of stuff listed.
Max level cruisers can carry 1,000kt (in stock anyways)

I say get better cruisers to be able to carry more than them.

Warning: Long post follows.

If you ignore quite a few weapons.
All sorts of guns can outrange AP beams.
Organic and Crystal tech have beam weapons with better range, those two and Temporal and Psychic have weapons in general with better range.
Then there are the Incinerator Beam and Wave Motion Gun, which have good damage and range that make up for slow fire rate.

I do see some weaknesses of the ship...
Some things that might make it easier to take it out or give other ships an advantage over it.

Emissive Armor is a total waste of space unless fighters are involved in large numbers, but fighters with the right weapons will not be hampered much.
20kt of space gets you...
1 Emissive Armor with 835kt and -50 damage reduction
4 standard Armor, with 6,040kt armor total.
Comparing a 200kt damage weapon, 6 shots to take out 1 Emissive Armor, 30 to take out 4 standard Armor.

Ideas that may or may not work well.

Meson Blasters and Ripper Beams might be an option, shorter range, but they do more damage and you can fit three of them in the space needed for 2 AP beams.
Range isn't everything, some people can take a knife to a gun fight and win.

Worse yet, with Organic tech, are Lightning Rays, 20kt, 2 second fire rate, 140ls max range and better damage than AP beams. These things make AP beams look less effective.
(on a side note, I hate the Drushocka...)

Quantum Toropedoes, only 40kt, 4 second fire rate, 180ls range, damage comparable to the larger, slower firing, and more expensive capital ship missile.
Not hard to fit 12+ on a cruiser. (or 24+ on a base Ship...) 2 PD isn't going to do very good against that many torpedoes, especially with a strategy to help them keep away from the range of the heavy AP equipped ship.

Fighters
Small Rocket Pods, Small Anti-Matter Torpedoes and Small Incinerator Beams, all of which pack more than enough damage to make emissive armor of limited use.
Only 2 PD means limited weapons that can easily shoot fighters.
20 of the little buggers are going to cause major trouble.

Drones
Preferably with some anti-engine, anti-weapon and anti-shield warheads, maybe a few standard warheads if there is space, on top of ramming damage. Expensive, but quickly crippling a ship early on limits its ability to damage other ships during battle, if not rendering it a sitting duck.

Wave Motion Gun, 2kt base damage and 180ls range, but 6 second fire rate.
Large mount is 5kt damage, Heavy mount is 7kt damage, massive is 10kt, they can do more damage per second than AP beams.
(basic or any mount a good reason to not rely purely on emissive armor)

Stealth or Scattering Armor, for the defense bonus (max of +54%/+53%).
Stealth Totem (if possible) for defense bonus (max of +25%).
Not getting hit in the first place is just as good as being able to take a lot of damage.

Hit or miss idea: Sat Ships, with sats, sats that have cheap weapons with large mounts, space efficient extra damage and +40ls range, for pot shotting those suddenly 'shorter ranged' AP beams.
Can't blow up a ship if it is running and dropping sats, or parked and dropping sats that act as a lethal fodder screen.

Hit or miss idea: "Battle Carriers" (or assault, or attack, or strike, or whatever you want to call it carrier), a warship packing a few fighter bays, preferably fighters with to many shields and armor and an incinerator, they pot shot the offending ship and soak up.draw off PD fire while other ships are free to torpedo the offending ships into smoldering wrecks.

Someone with Temporal and Crystal tech, weapons to quickly take out shields (moderate damage but quad damage to shields) and weapons that ignore armor (shard stuff).

The computer damaging weapon, which I think ignores shields and armor in general. A few shots, no more master computer, ship is rendered useless.

My ideas for tweaking the basic ship design to make a better one (armor stats and cruiser treated as if max level).
Remove 3 of the Emissive Armor, replace them with 1 Stealth Armor and 6 Standard Armor. (loose 2,500kt of armor to gain 9,900kt of armor and +54% defense bobus)
Replace 1 phased shild with 2 shield rengenerators, just to make it a little harder to deal with in longer battles (taking into account defense bonus from stealth armor and having much more armor).
Remove a heavy AP beam, toss on a Heavy mount Wave Motion Gun (7k damage at 180ls range), leftover 10kt is used, along with removing both beam PD, to mount 3 Meson PD, a little shorter range but they can fire twice as fast in addition to having a third one, a must when the enemy has lots of fighters, sats, seekers, etc.

Secondary idea for ship alterations for extra trouble.
Remove all Emissive armor, toss on a stealth armor and 10 standard armor (3,340kt vs. 15,985kt and +54% defense)
remove all Heavy AP beams, add in 2 Heavy Mount wave motion guns (14kt potential damage 2,333kt per second compared to maybe 1,000kt per second with heavy APs) and a heavy mount meson blaster (for targets the wave motion guns cannot target).
Gives those lonely beam PD some company and add in 2 meson PD and a bomblet missile for even greater unit/seeeker wasting potential.
add in 2 shield regenerators for those longer battles.
remaining space gets used for a security station (so some wise guy can't easily steal it), a self destruct (if someone does ship jack it, limit the chances they will live), and to add insult to injury, add in 2 engines (bringing it to the max of 12), plus crew quarters, life support and bridge, rendering the ship all but impervious to computer damaging weapons, while the master computer keeps it going in case of encounters with someone packing crew killing weapons.
Hows that for hard to kill death incarnate?

Total hell with Organic Tech, just replace 6 heavy AP with 9 heavy lightning rays, and watch the carnage.

One ship I sort of like that I made.
12 quantum engine, 1 bridge, 1 crew quarter, 2 life support (400 crew max). 1 auxiliary control, 6 armor, 1 phase shield, 1 shield regenerator, 1 solar sail, 1 med bay, 1 combat sensor, 1 basic sensor, 1 ecm, 1 security station, 1 self destruct, 3 heavy anti-proton, 3 large meson blaster, 6 quantum torpedo, 2 PD blaster, 1 flak cannon, 1 bomblet missile, 4 ordnance storage (or 1 ordnance vat), 1 quantum reactor.
Nothing special, but it is well rounded, sacrifices shields for ranged hitting power and extra PDs, and it is good for long range missions thanks to the quantum reactor and extra ordnance storage. It would be a simple task to remove the torpedoes for other components and weapons.

Also, 'death spam' ships...
a frigate design packing a large mount wave motion gun. Like the ion beam frigates from the Homeworld series, except able to pack other weapons and defenses.
A small ship is harder to hit, and the large mount wave motion gun can get upwards of 5kt of damage potential with ranges up to 180ls, meaning a few of these ships would be hard to hit by bigger ships due to their smaller size, while the bigger ships are easier to hit because of the larger size with lesser or even negative defense bonus.
Even when base ships are flying around, the smaller ship types should not be ignored.

6 heavy APBs are very good against everything usually.

You need to take manual control of your ships, dont send them to their death in a frontal assault. Make them face away from the ennemy and move just out of their attack range. Use longer ranged weapons of yours.

Or just swarm him with many lighter ships that have high durability.

Only 2 PDs and he waste your missiles?! Are you using the "max range" strategy on your missilers? If not, they will get close and get blown up. Missiles are good is you are as fast or faster than your ennemy to stay out of range of their guns.

Wave motion ray is good with massive range (stay far away), but is heavy.
Swarm him with fighters? Drones (kamikazes or otherwise)?
Parasite missiles have massive range and average damage.
Plasma missiles are slow but deal insane damage. They wieght just as much as CSMs.

Btw your missilers dont need to be very heavy ships or even heavily armored.. personally my missilers are always numerous frigates with maxed speed with the max range strategy.. in battle they almost always outlive the rest of the fleet. Organic tech is fun for that so armor regeneration help to survive "occasional" hits, same thing with shields. For me it works because they are fast, have numbers and are easy and quick to build, and many targets are harder to kill than just one.

Try using the item that reduce (a lot) the damage made by energy weapons. Its a cristaline tech i think. Something around 20% Damage reduction. This will reduce his damage and your ships will live that much longer.

-- Null space projectors havent been very good to me.. they are short-ranged, kind of slow and can be taken down by PDs. I would reccomend to put them on light expendable escort ships or drones rather than putting many on a single ship.
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Without ammo, nice guns are just sophisticated clubs.

What were the conditions of your simulation?

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Well, I just tested it with my ships. Against my standard heavy, it suffered no damage and owned my ship. Against the missile version, it suffered 25% dmg and destroyed my ship. Against 30 bombers, it died and only killed 18. Before you get to happy, this was is space sim, one light cv and the launched in groups of about 8 or so. The first group the cruiser got all but three, then it finished them off. But by that time the second group had got there, ripped a giant hole in the ship and then the third group showed up and finished it off.
Also just for giggles, tried it against my missile BB. It died in three shots, BB only took minor dmg to armor but since I play organics, no big deal.

BB ? What do you mean?

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Without ammo, nice guns are just sophisticated clubs.

BB means battleship.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I have learnt a few things in this game, one is that defence can be the best attack and two ships can pretty much fire from all angles regardless from front or back.

To get the best, you cut down a bit on the fat, for example, you only need a few supply or ordinance items, they have so many units each that two each is possibly enough. Second, is the choice of ships, I have my carriers move around the system, given the fighters can out run anything. I leave patrol ships round a few planets but my heavy hitters. I station them thre, but why not remove the engines as well? As daft as it sounds i did that. For this test I was at the same time adjusdting a battleship to be stationed on planets all the time and decided to give them greater space for weapons by reducing supply and ridding the engines as i noticed and as the space has proved, you can attack all angles.

And in a way its cheating, but i'm controlling an evil empire so am entitled to do it! So presenting the ship that crushed your ship mr bones, i give you the WAR-SHU! (in homge TO Washu...and it aint little either!)

Other then ridding the engines I only had two supply items and a ord vat, I had five AP beams, two graviton missiles and two crystiline missiles. I find crystiline weaponary to be brutal because it skips armor. I had three phased shielding, religious talisman, and vengence to spike attack. i also equipped some temporal weapons designed to ko shielding and speed up reload time and one to quad attack. Basic scanner was gone because this ship isn't going anywahere and dosen't need to, its part of a permeant garrison. I only included three organic armor, stealth and rest of standard armor. The stragety was to cut away the shielding and use weapons specifcally to bypass armor and straight onto structure. I would be chinking the ship away and with structure a lot less on points then armor then why not focus on that. The only catch is that this design costs roughly over 50,000! However it worked and your ship went down in three to four hits, The missiles hit your ship before your AP's fired and then when shields were down the crystiline torpedos/missiles did their job and destroyed it.

The beauty of this game is that at times just having AP beams dosen't gurantee a win, a mix of other weapons can do hell!

Korgeta, you had Religious, Temporal, Organic AND Crystalline traits? Wow. How did you manage that?

I was in control of 3 empires (I'm writing a fanfic based on space warfare and politics and useing the gameplay to help draw up scenarios) Two empires were normal based but the thrid I made insanely advanced by useing the alltec cheat, you can select the tec trait option in the setup but am not sure if your able to include all of them. i think you can but in this case i got the combined majority by entering the cheat code. I'm left unsure to decide which is the better based weaponary, the crystiline torpedo is impressive but some of the temporal tec really did surprise me which is what i like about this game, so many elemments explored and used. Though it was removing the engines and replacing them with weapons which gave my ship the win as more was fitted as at the end of the day his ship had to come to me.

So, you have proved absolutely nothing then. You used an all tech cheat to get all racial traits and hence all their unique techs. He's using a normal ship not a cheated one. If you want to use cheats just say, "I went in and turned on cheats and just erased your ship. I win!"

In one MP game I had the same problem - I was arriving at a pretty similar ship as the ideal combination after my opponent realized that he should put more effort into developing point-defense weapons, with similar shield/AP ratio. A 750kt cruiser equipped with 4 PD weapons could deal with a similar sized ship with 5 plasma missiles.

Null-space cannon does not have the range of AP beams for the same RP, and cannot target fighters. In my test lvl 7 AP with mounts beats lvl 3 NSP.

Assuming equal techs the way to counter them is ships with less unnecessary stuff. Sensors only on dedicated ship(s), less engines, no neural net if you do not have experienced ships (upgrade later if you have to), lvl 6 vehicle components instead of the expensive master computer. The cost difference is 3000+ on a ~13000 minerals ships, having 5 ships would beat 4 ships with one more AP beam each.

Master computers are the only addition outside of racial boosts, combat sensors, ECM, stealth and scattering armor that influence your ship attack and defense values. Believe me, deeper in the game you're going to consider them well worth the cost in order to be able to hit an opponent first with some maxed out beam weapon he'll also be carrying.

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See my PBW game stories on http://users.pandora.be/banzaiboy/sevpbw/.

Actually I assumed that when he said best attack ship possible I thought he meant the components of all the racial tec fields, however even if I didn't cheat, I would have (and have done) produce a strong enough ship. I did say in my first entry post to this that I reduced the irrelvent factors (having just one supply and one ord can be enough) and that removing eninges and basic sensor will leave space to add more missiles or AP beams. Simply because of the follwing.

The only thing that can truly defeat such a beast is a swarm of the overpowered fighters which canoutrun anyone and outrunning them is futile. If fighters are to be intercepted then it should be by other fighters in space without any celestral bodies (like planets) as for the other forces its best to outgun them. At least with a non moving force they'l be in formation at all times (for very obvious reasons)

I also stated before that even a non mmoving vessel can attack a ship and defeat a fast moving one even from behind as yo can still attack from all angles and those ships will always come to you. 17 moves is also frankly too many, your only taking a turn away from reaching your objective or at that stage in your game you should have warp opening technology so there isn't a need for mass number of engines anymore, that space can be used to add more armor or weapons. Though such a design is absurdly expensive.

Made some playtesting with full tech.

For the 750KT cruiser a master computer cost as much space as bridge+crew facilities, so difference is only cost. Base was 4 phased shield, ECM, Combat sensors, 40K worth of point defense, shield regen, 30-40KT armor, 10 quantum engines. Max range strategy for the most part.

AP ship: Six Heavy mounted AP beam.
A crewed vehicle cost like 17.5K vs 21.1K of a Master Computer control. 6 of the crewed type will overcome 5 MC cruiser. With somewhat weaker point Defense.

Selecting other beam weapon, the MC ships will prevail.

AP will defeat every other (at least IB WMG and Lighting Ray) beam-equipped ship.
AP will defeat ships equipped with NSP+MB combo (pretty one-sided).

With 40K point defense (beam+flak cannon) the AP ship will be defeated by the same cost Plasma Missile crew ship. With 80K PD and one less AP, the AP ship prevails. Also against QT and AMT.

AP with armor instead of shields will defeat Gamma Pulse Torpedo-equipped (shield-skipping) ships.

The AP ship will easily defeat heavy fighters of the same cost (22).

For larger ships, AP+MC+heavy/massive mount combo rules.
If you have superior numbers and overwhelm the defenders PM are the best
IOW, crystalline tech (for armor piercing) with GPT (for ignoring shields) have the ability to counter the AP equipped ships.

max APB beats max WMG? isn't there a balance problem here? isn't the WMG tech more expensive?

WMG's do way more damage, so if they hit they are far superior to APB. I usually have a mix + enough shileding/armor to survive the first hit by my opponent.

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See my PBW game stories on http://users.pandora.be/banzaiboy/sevpbw/.

Made some additional tests. The issue mainly depends on hit chance - size and such. For attacking large ships, WMG is better, attacking smaller ships APG. For cruisers AP is slightly better than BMG. For Baseship vs Baseship WMG is better. Baseship vs Frigate or even Baseship vs Cruiser for the same cost the size-optimal weapon choice wins.
Baseship WMG against Frigate AP is one-sided, 1 of 4 vs. 12 of 24 surviving.
Note: Frigates with no-mount AP, only 4 Q engines and normal crew.

Actually, Cruiser vs Cruiser WMG on OPTIMAL RANGE settings defeats the Max range APs. But the difference is not large enough to account for, say a small numerical superiority.

Conclusions:
The Rock-Paper-Scissors of GalCiv2 works better. Seekers can be defeated easily. In SEV the AP is almost as good as anything else. And AP can attack fighters which makes it superior to any larger weapons due to versatility.
GPT baseship defeats shield-equipped AP baseships with 16 PD weapons. Problem is that equipping it with armor instead of shields will save them. To counter it, there needs to be some armor-piercing weapons besides the crystallurgy tree (but there's none).
Suggestions:
Make DU cannon armor skipping but shields available as default (lvl 1 physics not 2).
Mull-space other all-skipping weapons needs more damage (perhaps range).
Make torpedoes longer ranged so they could outrange massive mounted beam weapons (150-160) - range of 180-200.
Decrease AP range and damage to that of PPB and Meson Blaster, or remove the hit bonus.

I'm not sure that a torpedo baseship can be seen as a ship of the line. It's should probably be considered as a supporting ship IMHO...

It's an interesting idea, maybe DUC should be slightly armor-piercing? Not too much, (5-10%?) because otherwise everyone will rush for shields!

IMHO APB being so polyvalent, it should be worse than any other weapon in terms of damage/sec/kt.

And then there's the little things called cost and time to build. They are left out of the equasion, but being able to field 100 ships of size x vs only 50 ships of size x will make a huge difference. Sometimes lots of cheaper ships > some of the most robust and hardest hitting ships.

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See my PBW game stories on http://users.pandora.be/banzaiboy/sevpbw/.

I think that was factored in the tests.

In general, larger ships are more effective due to larger mounts and relatively less space for auxiliary equipment. OTOH small barebone frigates (4 engines, some armor, shield, combat sensors, ECM, APG and a perhaps a cluster bomb) have roughly the same specific combat strength, within say 10-15%.
True that small ships are built faster. However, 5000KT damage would clean out say four frigates when a baseship, although damaged, would survive and need only repairs not extra production.