Transcription
Starting up the shield. In this video, I'm going to be looking at all of the different defensive and utility components we can place on our ships, breaking down exactly what they do, and then placing them in a tier list. I am going to be going through all of the Juggernaut auras, all of the Titan auras, all of the various combat computers, the different Mark of the insert your warp God here, absolutely everything that is over 43 unique and individual components. So make sure you're sitting comfortably, or at least standing comfortably. I'd recommend getting a snack and a drink because this is probably going to be a long video. If you're still with me, let's without any further ado, dive straight in.
At the very beginning, let's start right at the bottom in the F tier with the components I think are the absolute worst. Since the last time I have reviewed these components, quite a bit has actually changed. We have, of course, had the 3.6 combat rework, and you might be surprised what is in this F tier. First up, and possibly most surprisingly, we have an item that was in the past right up in the S tier for a list like this. We have Crystal infused plating. Unfortunately for plating, after the 3.6 rework, it is simply nowhere near as good as it used to be. It is not best in slot for your small, medium, or large utility slots. This is not the defensive module you want to put on your ships.
Now, of course, it does have some some benefits. First and foremost amongst those, it does not cost any alloys to put on your ships, so it is still very, very cheap. That's a plus. It doesn't require any power like shields, so you can fill up your defensive slots with this if you want to. And as ever, it adds hull points. So against things like bypass weapons, which we have more and more now in the game, I'm talking disruptors, missiles, that sort of thing, every type of weapon will have to hit this type of hull point before your ship will be destroyed. So it always provides additional defense.
Now, I can already hear some commenters furiously typing about why Crystal plating is still amazing, but let's get into the negatives so I can explain why it's honestly not. First up amongst those issues is the meager number of additional hull points that this now grants. After the rebalance, the hull points we gain from a large armor at, let's say tier 5, is around 1800. That's 1800. Over four times as many points from a single slot. Yes, those are armor points, not hull points, but that is still four times more points that your enemy would have to chew through. We also have ways of negating bypass weaponry. Now, I'm talking, of course, about armor and shield hardening. On top of that, repeatables do no bonus to this type of armor plating. The crystal plating, it doesn't get better over time. We've got no edicts that will increase this, and we would have to invest in additional modules if we would like it to regenerate over time. So overall, yes, it's still cheap, but it's almost always more cost-efficient. You will get a better ship and have better ships in the fight if you go with something like armor or shields instead.
Next up, we have the enigmatic encoder. Don't worry, I have far less to say about this one. Now, the enigmatic encoder will add plus one disengagement opportunities. Disengagement opportunities represent the maximum number of times your ship can roll the die and attempt to retreat, fall back out of the combat if it gets hit below 50% hull points. Increasing the number of disengagement opportunities will make your ship survive more engagements. Why is this pretty much useless though? Well, it's only plus one. There are lots of other ways to increase the number of disengagement opportunities your ships have without using up one of your precious auxiliary slots. You don't have very many of those. It is almost certainly not useful to waste it on an enigmatic encoder instead. Instead, I would recommend putting on a module that makes your ships harder hitting or actually more defensive, more able to survive in the combat for longer, rather than just increasing the chance they're going to run away.
The orbital trash disperser is basically absolute garbage, if you'll pardon the pun. It will grant plus 25 orbital bombardment damage, and that is it. Honestly, do not waste your time putting these onto your ships. Your ships do an amount of damage via orbital bombardment based on the size of the fleet in orbit. This has diminishing returns. The larger the fleet size, increasing the orbital environment damage with orbital trash disperser just gets you to those diminishing returns slightly faster. Honestly, don't waste the slot.
The reactor boosters grant you additional power generation on the ship at the cost of alloys, and let me tell you, you're paying quite a high premium for that extra power. Not only does this form of power generation cost you more alloys per point of power you generate, making it less efficient than your regular reactors, it of course also uses up one of your precious, precious auxiliary slots. There are a few niche cases where you might consider using these early on in the game, but generally, I would recommend avoiding them.
Combat computers have two main impacts. The first is that they provide some bonuses to your ship. The second is that they also influence your ship's behavior, specifically how close it will get to your enemy and whether it will continue to try to stay at that range or run further away. Picket combat computers make your ships charge at the enemy and remain in close to medium range. That means all of your short-range weapons should be able to fire and hit the enemy if you have this computer on your ships. Additionally, it's going to grant you some fire rate and extra tracking. Tracking is useful as it helps to negate evasion. However, after the rebalance from 3.6, we have far fewer higher evasion targets in the game. Destroyers received quite a bit of a nerf and can no longer reliably get their evasion up to high numbers, meaning all of this extra tracking is probably not as useful as you might think. Generally, using small slot weapons and having good sensors will be enough to negate the evasion bonus of any destroyers you might run up against. If you're coming up against corvettes, which can reliably hit the maximum 90 evasion, you might put some picket combat computers on your destroyers, but generally, I'd recommend going with carriers to fight corvettes rather than going out with destroyers. If you're running a disruptor heavy build, you're pretty much forced to take these picket combat computers, but that doesn't actually make them a good choice. It's just the other choices are even less helpful.
For each of these combat computers, I'm also going to take a moment to compare the Sapient computer to the precognitive computer. That's the psionic one. Both of these are always better than the advanced combat computer, so you should always upgrade into it, no matter which path you've gone down. The psionic combat computer will grant you plus 20 fire rate and plus 40 tracking. That is generally going to be the better version, as the Sapient combat computer only gives us 15 additional fire rate and plus 30 tracking. It does, however, grant plus 10 evasion, so on the off chance you're trying to max out your evasion on your destroyers, it could be useful, but then again, there are so few sources of evasion, especially if you're not going for a psionic ascension, that I really wouldn't recommend it.
The ancient targets scrambler is a new Titan component that has been added. If you have the Ancient Relics DLC, it does require some minor artifacts to build, but as it's on a Titan, you won't have to spend that many to get a full fleet with these. Is it any good though? Well, it's down in the F tier, so as you've guessed, it's probably not that great. It adds plus 5% chance to evade fleet-wide. That is not system-wide, that is fleet-wide. So you would need one Titan in each fleet to grant this plus 5% chance to evade, and like all of the other Titan auras, it does not stack. This 5% chance to evade is not an additional 5% increase on the base chance, like for example, the bonus we get with afterburners. It is a 5% increase on top of whatever number you get to. So this 5%, this plus 5, is also not modified by any bonuses on the ship. It's a minor increase. It's not enough to get your destroyers up to that fabled 90%, and generally for most ships you'll be running a lot of, especially cruisers, your evasion is not high enough to actually be negating many incoming attacks. Regular sensors are going to provide almost enough tracking to do away without any way, even with this extra 5% bonus, which then kind of makes it useless.
The munitions plant is a Juggernaut aura which grants all allies in the same system plus 30 orbital bombardment damage. It has the same problems as that piece of trash we talked about earlier, and I don't really feel like I need to go into more details. Just, just don't run it.
We're now moving from the F to the C tier. You probably still don't want to use the modules in this tier, however, there may be some niche cases where they're actually all right. The crystal forged plating is a straight-up better version of Crystal plating than the Crystal infused plating. It grants us almost double the hull points of crystalline fuse plating, but it is only available if we find and kill the Crystal Nidus in the crystalline entities' home system. It still suffers from all of the drawbacks that regular Crystal and fuse plating has, which include things like hull damage reducing ship performance, no repeatables to increase its value, and much lower total hit points added than armor or shields. However, if you're coming up against a purely bypass weapon fleet and it's the early to mid-game, Crystal Forge plating is possibly your best in slot choice.
Shield capacitor takes up an auxiliary slot, adding plus 10 shield hit points to our ship overall. Why is this not fantastic? Well, first up, of course, it uses an auxiliary slot, and those are precious. Adding 10 to our shield hit points could be nice, could be good. However, we have a maximum ceiling on our total shield hit points based on the power output of our ship, that generally means we can have it between half and two-thirds of our utility or defensive modules with shields on top of that. Shields provide less additional hit points than armor does, so you're increasing by 10 the value of a smaller overall number.
Cloaking fields are fun, but generally they're mainly a bit of a gimmick. You can cloak your ships, meaning the enemy cannot shoot them. In the original versions, the basic advanced in the league cloaking field, when you de-cloak, you get full shield nullification. The largest ship size with these regular fields that you can cloak is a cruiser, and they don't add much cloaking value. Most empires will be able to find you and force you to de-cloak if they build a single star base dedicated to the task. Dark matter cloaking field generators allow you to cloak battleships, and they only inflict a 50 shield nullification when you de-cloak. Sci-phase field generators are the best cloaking fields around, able to cloak anything and cloak them relatively well. On top of that, you will get 100 shield nullification unless you're using psionic shields or psionic barriers, which will suffer no shield nullification. This makes them the best cloaking field generated around, especially for psionically ascended empires. The issue with all of these cloaking fields is, as I mentioned before, at the beginning, it is kind of a gimmick. Overall, yes, it's nice to have it on your side ships, and yes, it can be nice to sneak around before a war, but generally, because cloaking does not allow you to bypass FTL inhibitors, it is mainly a gimmick and won't have that much strategic value for your ships.
Line combat computers provide additional fire rate and additional chance to hit. Chance to hit is another word for accuracy in all of these tooltips, so it can increase your weapons' accuracy, but not beyond 100, and that is the main issue with line combat computers. If your weapons are already at 100% accuracy, or possibly at 95 or 90, you're going to find you're adding excess chance to hit, which is completely lost and negated. This is especially true in the mid to late game. Sapient combat computers bring this up to a 20 fire rate and 20 additional chance to hit bonus. That means unless you're running full kinetics, which I generally would not recommend, you're not really going to be getting all of your bonus, making quite a bit of this modifier superfluous from that perspective. The precognitive interface could be considered better. It only adds 15 fire rate and 15 accuracy, but it also grants plus 10 tracking, which is helpful, I suppose, if you're coming up against lots of corvettes or something like that. Generally, I think in this case, the Sapient computer is going to be better, as you're more likely to be coming up against and finding difficulty killing cruisers and battleships rather than finding it hard to get rid of the corvettes. Corvettes won't be doing as much damage to you, generally, you can kind of ignore them even if you're not really able to kill them as effectively. All of these line combat computers will cause your ship to behave in a way that puts it into medium range and a holding formation. They won't try to get too close, but they also won't try to back off very far from the enemy ships. This should roughly be around range 50.
Swarm combat computers are one of the two options available to you on your corvettes. They're going to be adding fire rate and evasion. As we can see from this advanced version, 10 fire rate and 10 evasion. In the early game, this bonus to evasion is minor and slightly useful. It will hopefully, if your opponent doesn't have all small slot weaponry, actually mean you're getting some damage negation through your evasion. And that's because small slot weaponry does have quite a lot of tracking. When we include incentives and that sort of thing, it will probably negate our evasion by the mid-game. And because of this overall lack of effectiveness of evasion in the current meta, which is very heavily on small slot and medium slot weaponry, disruptors and missiles are very powerful weapon choices, this probably isn't the best combat computer we can put on our ships. Having said that, if you're running corvettes, the only other option is going to be the picket combat computer, which is not going to be much better either. This is generally going to be better than picket. You will prefer to have the evasion against large weaponry. It is going to be somewhat useful, but don't expect this to save your corvette fleets. When it comes to behavior, the swarm combat computer will force your ships to charge right at the enemy, going to the closest possible range and staying there. This is almost the same as the picket combat computer.
In game terms, though, comparing the Sapient and precognitive, Sapient is going to grant us a bit more fire rate, pushing it up to 15, and a larger boost to evasion at plus 25. Important to note here, this is not a 25-point boost to evasion. This is increasing whatever your evasion statistic is by 25 extra. The base evasion for corvettes is 60, so that 25% on the 60 would be an additional 15 evasion, putting you up to 75, getting you closer to that maximum of 90. If you're running fleets of only corvettes, I think the precognitive combat computer is the better computer to pick, though it only grants us 15 evasion, but we get a whopping plus 20 sublight speed. When we combine that sublight speed bonus with other sublight speed bonuses we can get, that should give your fleet of corvettes a massive tactical advantage over destroyers, cruisers, or battleships that will be light years behind you.
The Mark of Whisperers adds 15 additional evasion. This component is best on corvettes. It has some usage on destroyers, but with the changes in 3.6, as I've outlined earlier, it is much, much harder to get your destroyers up to that 90 evasion. We don't have any of the Admiral bonuses running around anymore, for example. So this, this puts Mark of Whisperers comfortably low down there. There are other utility components we have at our disposal if we wanted to increase our evasion that, whilst maybe not increasing it as much as this 15%, do other things that give us much better overall bonuses from a holistic perspective. And if you're enjoying this video, please holistically mark that like button.
Targeting grid is a Titan aura that grants plus 10 tracking to the fleet the Titan is in. This bonus is only really useful to fleets which are mainly filled with large weapons that have little to no tracking. Those fleets may struggle dealing damage to corvettes as they don't have any fighters, they don't have any real counters to them. However, generally speaking, I don't think you're going to be running large fleets with only L slot weapons. If you are, yes, maybe throw one of these in there, but that's only if you know you're going to come up against a lot of corvettes, and the likelihood of that is, I would say, quite low. It's much better to not waste your Titan aura on something like targeting grid, but instead build some dedicated anti-corvette ships that also have other useful abilities as well, like possibly carriers, maybe some missile-equipped ships, or some disruptor-equipped ships.
Last up in the C tier, we have the ECM emitters. This is a Juggernaut aura that will affect every single hostile ship in the system. It will give them minus 30 point defense damage and minus 30 point defense firing rate. This means their flak and PD batteries will not be able to shoot down your missiles or fighters as effectively. The overall effectiveness of this is, however, minimal, and it relies heavily on you knowing your opponent is coming with a lot of PD, and you having equipped your ships with a lot of weapons that will struggle if they come up against point defense. The better thing to do if you already know your opponent has lots of point defense is possibly change to something that won't be as affected by it. And if you don't know that they're running lots of point defense, well, fitting out a Juggernaut with ECM emitters is very much a shot in the dark.
We're about halfway through the list now. We're going to look at the B tier. Modules in this tier are of course not absolutely terrible, however, you probably are only going to use them in moderate amounts for specific and targeted reasons. First up, we have a defensive staple, and that is shields or deflectors. The first problem we have here is that a large number of very powerful weapons completely ignore and bypass these defenses. Missiles, torpedoes, fighters, and disruptors will all sail straight through and not even have to do any damage to these shields while destroying your ship. On top of that, shields require power. Power is at a premium on your ships. You need it for your weapons to function, you need it for your drive to function, your computers, lots and lots of things require power. So because shields have a power requirement, we cannot, even if we know our enemy is coming with all lasers, for example, which do very low damage to shields, we cannot completely outfit our ships with shield defenses while maintaining our offensive weaponry. And you should never get rid of weapons in order to put on an extra shield or an extra armor component or anything like that. This means that the maximum amount of shields we can generally have on our ships is about half of the slots, and so we cannot specialize in shield-defended ships. On top of that, shield hit points are lower by quite a bit than their armor equivalent. Yes, equipping your ship with shields would be a bit cheaper than putting armor on, which does come at a higher cost in alloys, however, per slot, you're simply not getting as many hit points as you could with other modules.
It's worth also mentioning the Dark Matter deflectors that can only be acquired from reverse engineering fallen or awakened Empire ships. These are better than the level 5 hypershields, having more hit points and more shield regeneration. They do, however, cost more in terms of alloys and they have a cost in dark matter too. Overall, I generally wouldn't recommend you actually run Dark Matter deflectors unless you have a very solid economy and you can afford to be spending lots and lots of other resources either buying dark matter or producing lots of dark matter yourself.
Then we come to a component that pairs very well with shields and helps shore up one of their major shortcomings. This is The Shield Hardener. Shield hardening does something rather interesting. It blocks bypass weaponry. So, for example, if we just had one of these advanced shield hardeners on our ships, it would grant us 25 shield hardening. So if a 100 bypass weapon like a disruptor fired on our ship, 25% of the damage done would instead of going directly to our hull points, hit our shield points instead. Why is this a big deal? Well, it effectively allows us to massively increase the number of HP we have on our ships. And if we have weapons that are bypassing our shields, they're generally lower in damage. So a shield hardener should add to the survivability of your ship overall. Everything I've just said makes it sound like shield hardening is really, really good, and it is. So why is this all the way down here in the B tier? Well, shields require power, and they also have much lower hit points than armor. This means that based on the number of auxiliary slots we have at our disposal, getting to a high level of shield hardening is very difficult. We'd have to use all of them, and the total number of shield points we can get is limited as well by our power requirements, which overall makes shield hardening not the most effective version of hardening.
The ancient suspension field combines both a shield and a shield hardener. This is an archeo-technology, though, so it does require minor artifacts if you're going to build it on your ships. And in large quantities, this can be completely impossible for a lot of empires. I'm going to assume you'll take the arkio engineers Ascension perk if you get these shields, because that boosts the shield hit points by about 60%. The base shield hit points here are equivalent to a level 3 shield, with the upgraded version, if you take the Ascension perk, being about 120 points shy of a level 5 shield. The power requirement, however, is identical to a level 5 shield, so you're really not going to be able to put more than about three or four of these on your ship, getting you to only 60 shield hardening. Unless hit points than if you went with level 5 shields, you could push that a little bit further by putting reactor boosters on your ships and entirely giving up your auxiliary slots, though overall I really would not recommend this. If you go all in on this tactic, you'll have a very high cost in minor artifacts, which could mean if your fleets get wiped out, you are simply unable to replace them with these designs. On top of that, if you come up against weaponry that is not bypass weaponry, this will be completely useless. All of this extra effort you've gone to to include the shield hardening is then pointless. Generally, I would actually recommend you go with level 5 shields and the advanced shield hardener. You can get a larger shield hit point level and more shield hardening through that combination than just going for these ancient suspension fields.
The auxiliary fire control fits into your auxiliary slots and adds plus 5 chance to hit. This means it increases the accuracy of all of your weapons by five percent. Do not be fooled, though. This cannot go above 100, meaning that for some of the best weapons in the game, this auxiliary fire control is now entirely useless. I'm of course talking about disruptors that start with 100% accuracy and missiles that also have 100% accuracy. The top and bottom of it is, with auxiliary fire control, there are now generally better options that will provide us more tactical and strategic flexibility that we're gonna find higher up in this list.
Mark of the Eater is another of our special marks, and I should really explain where they come from because I didn't before. So if you psionically ascend your empire and go into the Shroud, you get the option of forming a covenant or a pact with one of four entities. There is the Composer of Strands, the Eater of Worlds, the Instrument of Desires, and the Whisperers of Yada Yada. Eventually, once you've had a covenant for long enough, you should get access to special technologies and bonuses like the different marks that can be placed on our ships. Mark of the Eater is not that great, though. You get plus five chance to hit, so it's equivalent to the auxiliary fire control we just looked at, and plus 25 orbital bombardment damage, which is not really worth the pixels that's written with.
The nanobot cloud is a Titan aura that only affects the one fleet that your Titan is in. This cannot be stacked, of course, and it grants us plus 5% daily hull regen and plus 15% daily armor regen. However, in combat, those numbers are divided by a factor of 10, so it grants half a percent daily hull regen and 1.5% daily armor regen. This is nice if you're going on some long-range missions and you know you will not be able to repair your fleet. However, it isn't that overwhelming, especially in combat. It won't grant you enough additional hit points to survive a battle if you're being targeted by enemy forces, and of course, if your Titan gets killed, you entirely lose this regen capacity, which cannot go beyond the primary fleet.
Inspiring presence is another Titan aura that is only fleet-wide. It grants 5% additional fire rate to the other ships in your fleet. This is a nice, generous bonus that will stack on any fleet. It's probably the default go-to if you're choosing a Titan aura and you want to buff your fleets rather than hinder the enemy fleets, though I would say that hindering the enemy fleet is almost always better, but we'll get to why that is in some of the higher tiers.
Rounding out the B tier, we have a Juggernaut aura. Subspace amplifier boosts your speed tactically by reducing your hyperdrive jump cooldown time. We'll get a minus 40 to charge time and a minus 40 to cooldown for hyper jumps and jump drives as well. This is particularly useful if you combine it with a fleet of other ships that have jump drives and use it to launch immediate and striking Blitzkrieg assaults on your enemy, knocking them out. Where it isn't so useful is in mundanely moving around. You could end up finding your fleets are strung out if you don't micromanage them properly, and it does force all of your fleets to move at the speed of the slowest ship in the pack, which in this case will be your Juggernaut, which is still very, very slow. So even if your individual ships like cruisers and destroyers are faster than your enemy, you will lose that tactical advantage.
We've made it all the way now to the A tier. We're not yet at best in slot components, but these components are still very good, and in certain situations, they may be exactly what you're looking for. First up, we have psionic shields. These are shields you can get if you are psionically ascended. Why are they at one tier higher than regular shields? Well, these shields give you hit points almost equivalent to dragon scale armor, which is the module you're adding the most hit points of any in the game. That is absolutely fantastic and removes one of the biggest weaknesses with shields, which is they provide so little in terms of hit points compared to armor. It does come with a large power requirement, and you almost certainly cannot run these on your ships effectively without Dark Matter reactors. Another minor bonus is that if your ship has sci-phase field generator cloaking, that will not nullify the shield, so when you de-cloak, you'll have full shield.
I will also mention these psionic barriers, which is a technology that can only be acquired via the doorway event. The psionic barrier provides hit points equivalent to a tier 2 shield, but has the massive upside of requiring absolutely no power. And like the psionic shields, if you have a side-phase cloaked ship, these shields will not be reduced at all. As the game goes on, it becomes less and less powerful because it is locked in at that tier 2 shield equivalent.
Regenerative hull tissue grants your ship plus 5% daily hull regen and plus 10% daily armor regen whilst you are in combat. That is reduced by a factor of 10, like all other regen components, down to half a percent daily hull and one percent daily armor. This won't save your ship from being killed immediately in a battle, but it will allow you to repair your ships while they are out in the field without the need to go home and dock at a space dock and repair. This can leave you in the fight for longer, and it means engagement after engagement, your ships will repair somewhat and then be ready to face an enemy fleet with much greater resolve.
The upgraded version of the regenerative hull tissue is the nanite repair system. This grants in combat 1.5% daily hull regen and 2% daily armor regen. It does, however, require nanites, which in most games are in very short supply. If you can get your hands on the nanites, then yes, go for it. Otherwise, just stick to that regular regenerative hull tissue.
The enigmatic decoder is an auxiliary slot component that is basically the fire control with another bonus. This grants plus 5 chance to hit and plus 5 tracking. Those two bonuses together from the same component are a rare but welcome treat. This will mean your weapons will almost never miss, especially if you stack a couple of these on your ships. Of course, try not to combine it with weapons that are already at 100% accuracy, but if you have a mixed profile of weapons on your ship, you will still benefit from this plus 5 tracking when coming up against high evasion targets.
Carrier combat computer simply adds engagement range to our ships. The advanced version adds 50%. This means that your fleet will engage first or earlier because we have a larger engagement range, and that means they will start flying their fighter craft out, for example, if you have fighters on your ship, or they will lock an enemy fleet into combat before that fleet would normally be locked. This means the fleet will be unable to escape the system, and you will be able to hunt them down with impunity. When it comes to the behavior of your ships with this combat computer, they will stay at the absolute maximum range they can, which if you have hangers, is the hangar range. I will note you only need one of these carrier computers on one of your carriers to get this bonus engagement range for the entire fleet, and from there, you could swap out the rest of them to a combat computer tutor, maybe that provides some better actual combat bonuses.
The Sapient combat computers double that engagement range up to a whopping 100% bonus, which is really, really wild. If you have carriers, that's pretty much the entire system. If you have Titans, that is again pretty much the entire system. Precognitive computers are definitely not better. They grant only 75% engagement range and plus 10 tracking. If you have a carrier combat computer on your ship, you probably aren't equipped for close-range fighting, which means yes, that plus 10 tracking will help on any L slot weapons, but it definitely will not help your fighters. They are already going to do the best they can possibly do.
Mark of the Composer is basically identical to the nanite repair system, granting one and a half percent daily hull regen and two percent daily armor regen while in combat. On the other hand, this doesn't require any nanites, so if you get your hands on this component, you can really go to town with it.
The subspace snare is the first Titan aura we have come across that is meant to target hostile enemy ships. Now we have to understand, offensive Titan auras are different to the supportive auras. These will not just target one enemy fleet, but every single enemy fleet and ship in the system, giving it a much larger power range and scope. The subspace snare grants minus 20 combat disengagement chance and plus 100 emergency FTL jump cooldown. This will vastly reduce the number of ships your opponent is able to get out of the fight and get back home and repair via the disengagement mechanic, meaning in a longer, more drawn-out war, you'll have a better chance of winning. I would say that it pairs best when you are fielding lots and lots of fleets full of disruptors, which do tend to have a habit of forcing the enemy to retreat rather than destroying them.
The shield dampener reduces enemy shield hit points by 20%. That can be particularly effective if you're coming up against enemies with lots and lots of shields, as you can probably imagine. An important thing to know with this one is this is only an additive minus 20. So if you come up against a 25x crisis and they are very shield-focused, like the Unbidden, instead of reducing the hit points by 20, it will reduce the hit points from 25x down to 24.8, which is less than a one percent reduction.
Strike command is an aura for Juggernaut that grants all of the allies in the same system plus 20 strike craft damage and plus 20 strike craft speed. That additional speed is probably the main bonus here, as we can get lots of other ways of stacking strike craft damage already. That extra speed will mean your strike craft get into range faster, so you have more time hitting down the enemy before they can actually return fire.
Ladies and gentlemen, congratulations, you've made it all the way to the end. I assume you haven't skipped forwards here and you've listened to the thoughts and reasons for why everything else was in the tiers below. But now we have got to the point where we're only looking at what I believe is the best in slot items, pretty much, that you can pick to put on your ships from a defense or utility point of view. Armor used to be really, really bad. It would definitely not be up here in the S tier, but oh, how the turn tables. Unlike their counterpart shields, armor does not require any power. It also doesn't require any strategic resources to build in the higher levels, which is a nice bonus. And overall, armor has about a third, if not more, hit points than shields of equivalent level, meaning that you get more bang for your buck when it comes to slot efficiency. Now, armor does lack regeneration, unlike shields. You would have to put another component like the regenerative hull tissue onto your ship so that you've got passive regen without being at space dock. Armor is also vulnerable to a variety of weapons, including lasers. However, because you have more hit points on a single component of armor than of shields, plus 50 versus armor is not the same as plus 50 versus shields. Due to this larger number of base hit points, it will take anti-armor weapons longer to break through that armor. It would require them to deal extra damage, at least 33%, as opposed to an anti-shield weapon shooting at a shield per slot on the ship. Overall, this means that armor is a much more resilient component than shields on your ships, and you should go out and equip it. I generally recommend a single shield component and then fill up the rest of them with armor.
Dragon scale armor can only be acquired by defeating a dragon Leviathan. To all intents and purposes, though, it is level 6 armor and just a straight-up upgrade to the maximum level 5 armor. If you have dragon scale, you should use it at the top level.
Afterburners, or advanced afterburners, add 20 sublight speed and 10 evasion. That evasion is a nice bonus to have, but that is not why you should be running these. The bonus to sublight speed is much more important. If you maximize the sublight speed of your ships and then give them long-range weaponry and carrier or artillery computers, they will comfortably stay out of range or kite the enemy ships while dealing death and destruction to them. That will minimize your losses because no one can kill what they cannot hit. And speaking of hitting, we've just hit over 41 minutes through this rather large tier list, and now is the time for the secret call out. If you are still watching, if you've been watching the whole way through, please let me know down in the comments below. I would love to hear from you.
Paul Sama is quite an interesting defensive module. It is armor and it is shields. This is an architect, so you will need minor artifacts in order to build it. And if you take the RKO Engineers Ascension perk, it doubles the shield hit points. With that Ascension perk, the shields go from being equivalent to a level one deflector all the way up to being just shy of a level 4 advanced shield. Interestingly, two ancient pulse armors provide more shield and armor hit points than one level 5 armor and one level 5 shield. That means the optimum ship defensive module design probably includes two of these ancient pulse armor and then the rest all regular armor. It does require some power, but two of these pulse armors is roughly equivalent in power usage to one shield at the maximum level. The main downside here is getting over that minor artifact cost, but if you can, it is quite an efficient piece of kit.
We were introduced to the hardening concept with shield hardening. Armor hardening does the exact same thing, but for, well, armor. This is generally better because armor has more hit points than shields, so there is more HP to soak up that incoming damage, especially if we can get up to 100% armor hardening.
Artillery combat computers, like the carrier combat computers, will put your ships at their maximum range, the longest range of their weapons, and they will also try to back off from enemy ships if those ships come towards you, which is great for kiting enemy forces. This means you can put these artillery combat computers on missile ships, on long-range artillery ships, anything that can stay out of range of your opponent if it has enough speed and deal lots and lots of damage. When it comes to the actual bonuses you get from this combat computer, for the advanced, that's 10 fire rate and an additional 10 weapons range. The extra weapons range is great if you have the speed because it means you can stay in range of your opponent who will not be in range of you. The Sapient combat computers double up that bonus to 20 fire rate and 20 weapons range, I believe, making it the better option over the precognitive artillery combat computer, which only grants 15 additional fire rate and weapons range, and then a bonus of plus 10 tracking, which I don't think you'll generally need.
Torpedoes aren't massively effective weapons in Stellaris that deal additional damage based on the hull size of the ship you're trying to strike. Maximum damage is done to battleships and Titans, and an initial torpedo salvo can be completely devastating. The torpedo combat computers are also really, really good. They are the only combat computers that straight up add additional weapons damage, adding for the advanced plus 10 explosive weapons damage, which is the main weapon you should have on your torpedo cruisers or torpedo frigates. Missiles and torpedoes, they also in terms of behavior put you right in front of enemy ships, ready to strike them hard in the face, and that's exactly where you need to be to offload your short-range torpedoes. The Sapient torpedo combat computer grants 15 explosive weapons damage, but is honestly just straight up worse than the precognitive computer. That's because it gives not only 15 explosive weapons damage, just like the Sapient computer, but also plus 10 tracking. So there's no point not to go for this, though you do rarely get a choice here.
The Mark of the Instrument is definitely the best Mark out there. It grants 25 sublight speed and minus 5% ship upkeep. That is an economic bonus that will stack if you put multiple marks on your ship, and a massive bonus, pretty much the best you can get for a single auxiliary slot component to your sub light speed, which as I've mentioned before, is now very, very important for your ships to have the most of, not just on the map before you get into combat, but also during the combat itself.
The quantum destabilizer is an offensive Titan aura, meaning it targets, as usual, all hostile enemy forces in the same system. One of these bad boys will reduce the fire rate of all enemy ships by 10%. In terms of an all-rounder bonus that you will always be useful, Quantum destabilizer is your best bet.
Last, but by I absolutely no means least, we have the target acquisition array. This array is a Juggernaut aura that will benefit all allied ships in the system, granting a whopping 40 additional ships' weapons range. When we combine that with other bonuses and other modules to possibly slow down the sublight speed of enemy ships, you may get in two full rounds of fire before your enemy is able to close the gap and engage you, and that can be absolutely devastating. If you've enjoyed this video where I rate all of the defensive and utility components for Starships, you definitely want to hear what I think about all of the different weapons in Stellaris. If you'd like to watch that, please click the video on screen now.