Starships

Starships form your military and allow you to assert your power in the galaxy. Ships generally fit into ship classes. You can also create your own vessels with numerous ship parts within the ship designer.

Ship Roles

A Ship's role defines the behaviour of the starship during combat. A ship’s role will set its targeting priorities, defending priorities (where applicable), and where it will spawn in battle. You can choose a ship‘s battle role when saving a new design.

There are six options for ship roles:

• Support: Ships that support the fleet or have a special role in-game
• Capital: The heart of the fleet with support modules and long-range weapons
• Escort: Those that protect Capital and Support ships
• Assault: They will attack high-value and high-threat targets
• Interceptor: They will attack enemy Support ships and high-value targets
• Guardian: Those that defend Support ships and high-value targets

Determining Roles

When a ship is created using the Ship designer, a default battle role is assigned to the ship based on various factors. User-created ships will be assigned the default battle role when saving the design, but the role can be manually changed to any role the player wishes when saving the design.

A ship's default role is determined by the following attributes:

• Threat
• Fortitude
• Value

All ship equipment has at least one attribute assigned to them. Threat is assigned to weapons (beams, kinetics, missiles), Fortitude is assigned to defenses (hull plating, shields, point defense), and Value is assigned to other equipment (drives, life support, modules).

As equipment is added to a ship, these attributes are added together to decide what role the ship will have. If threat is the largest it will be an attacker, if fortitude is largest it will be a defender, and if value is larger than the sum of both threat and fortitude, the ship is labelled as support.

The hull size also influences what role a ship will have, though all hull types with value as the highest attribute will be support. Tiny ships can be Interceptors (threat) or Guardians (fortitude), small ships can be Assaults (threat) or Escorts (fortitude), medium and large ships can be Capitals (threat) or Escorts (fortitude) and huge ships will be Capitals regardless of whether threat is larger than fortitude.

Target and attack priority

Ships will begin combat with the highest priority enemy as their target. If their target is out of range, they will fire on any other enemy ships within range until their highest priority target ship is finally in range. You can see which enemy ship is considered their target by hovering over the ship icon in the lower part of the screen while in the battle viewer or by selecting the ship on the battle map.

Ships will fire on targets highest on their priority list. This could result in loss of focus fire when ships with different ship roles have different priority targets within range. A ship will also stop firing on an already damaged enemy in favor of its higher target priority ship coming into range, even if the previously damaged enemy is near destruction. For example, interceptors that have a guardian as their primary target will fire upon enemy interceptors while they pass each other, but will continue moving towards the entire time and eventually start firing on the guardians.

Defend priority

Defend priority causes a ship to stay near an ally ship that it is protecting. It does not affect the primary target of the ship but only whether or not the ship is willing to move forward towards it. If the ship it is defending has started moving forward, it will follow.

Because of the defend priority, a guardian will not move forward and join the battle until its support ship starts to move forward. (Support ships remain at zero speed at the map edge until all ally interceptors, assault ships, and capital ships have been eliminated.) It will, however, attack any enemies that come into range.

An escort will move forward and attack enemies if it is defending a capital ship. An escort that is defending a support ship however will remain in the back out of combat, similar to the guardian as described above, and the escort ship will only move forward once the support ship starts to do so.

Starting location

Each ship's position at the start of a battle is determined by the ship's role. The higher the starting position number, the closer the ship will start near the enemies.

Battle Role	Target Priority	Defend Priority	Starting Location	Notes
Support	Will only attack if all other types are gone Interceptors - Assaults - Escorts - Capitals - Guardians - Supports -	--	1200	These ships should stay alive until the end of the fight. They are unarmed or they just have augmentations mounted that support the whole fleet.
Guardian	Will only attack if the defended ship attacks. Attacks Interceptors first, then Assaults, then Escorts	Defends Supports if available, then Capitals, then Escorts	1200	These ships protect the Supports. They won‘t fight until all other targets are destroyed. If there is no Support in the fleet, they defend Capitals. If there are no Capitals available, they defend Escorts.
Capital	Escorts - Capitals - Assaults - Interceptors - Guardians - Supports	--	1400	Capitals should have less defense and lots of attack. They stay behind their fighters and shoot with ranged weapons while supporting their fighters in the fleet. Capitals can also have support modules mounted because they last nearly as long in the fight as supports
Escort	Assaults - Escorts - Capital - Interceptors - Guardians - Supports	Defends Capitals and Supports	1600	Escorts defend your Supports and Capitals, but since they start more in front of the fleet they will still take part in the battle.
Assault	Escorts - Capitals - Assaults - Interceptors - Guardians - Supports	--	1500	Assaults will attack Escorts and then Capitals. The pure battle ship.
Interceptor	Guardians - Escorts - Supports - Interceptors - Assaults - Capitals	--	1600	Interceptors will try to remove Support ships from the enemy fleet, so first they attack Guardians because those defend the Support ships, then Escorts.

Tactical speed

Tactical speed determines how quickly a ship moves during combat. You can view a ship's current speed by selecting the ship on the battle viewer. Most ships start out at a low speed when combat begins, about 1/4 maximum speed, moving towards the center of battle. Once any ship starts firing, all ships that are moving will increase their speed and advance toward their primary target as quickly as possible.

Support ships start the furthest back and will not advance forward until there are no ally attack ships (interceptors, assault ships, and capital ships) left in its fleet. As long as at least one of these ship types remain, the support ship will maintain a speed of zero. Any vessels defending the support ships will move around at low speed but will remain in the back with the support ships as well. As soon as there are no remaining ally attack ships, the support ships will begin moving forward to join the fight, along with any defending guardians and escorts that are there as well.

Weapon range

It‘s useful to compare the range and fire rate of weapons:

• Missiles: 1300 and slow fire rate
• Beam: 1000 and medium fire rate
• Kinetic: 800 and fast fire rate

A Capital ship with kinetic weapons would not be the best choice because it will start farther behind in the fight and will take time until it is in kinetic weapon range. Same for Interceptors if they have missiles mounted. Since they are already close to the enemy at the beginning of the fight they need faster shooting weapons like kinetic and beams.

Strategy

A few things to think about when you are assigning ship roles:

• Remember that the ship role determines how far out in front the ship will be at the beginning of the battle. If you have only short range weapons, starting in the very back of the battle may not be a good idea. On the other hand, if you have all long range weapons, starting in the back and letting the enemy come to you would be a valid strategy.
• Having different types of ship roles can lead to some serious disadvantages. For example, if you have a fleet consisting of half interceptors and half support ships, the interceptors will fly straight into the enemy fleet while your support ships stay back out of range. This effectively means you have split your fleet into 2 forces, which will likely lead you to have heavy losses.

Defenders & Attackers Doctrine

A fleet can become more resource effective and take fewer losses if some ships specialize in defense and others in offense. In a regular fleet, the defenses are spread out on each ship; in the Defenders & Attackers Doctrine, the defenses are concentrated on one or more ships at the very front of the fleet, so that an enemy must cut through all the defenses first before they can kill any damage specializing ships. This allows a fleet to take a lot of damage without losing its momentum. Damaged defenders can be swapped out for fresh ones after battle, and if the enemy switches to different weapons, just change the defender design to counter it.

There are 2 role combinations that work for this doctrine:

• Escort (defenders) + Capital (attackers)
• Guardians (defenders) + Support (attackers) as long as there are no assault, interceptor, or capital ships also in the fleet

Note that Escorts (defenders) + Support (attackers) would also work (as long as there are no assault, interceptor, or capital ships also in the fleet) in terms of forcing all defenders to be killed before the attacks can start being damaged, the escorts have a starting position too far in front of the support ships for this combination to be effective.

A variation of the Defenders & Attackers doctrine is Capital or Support ships equipped with Assault drones (Escort role, small hull, mixed weapons and mixed defenses). The special thing with drones is that they are both offense and defense rolled into one, and the more drones a fleet has, the more protected it is.

Lost drones are replenished over time, and this doesn't seem to cost anything, and carrier modules have a very low maintenance cost considering the weapons and defenses it brings. To create strong carrier fleets, get the Transportation Specialization technology (the very first specialization in the engineering tree's top branch, -30% mass for carrier modules). The cargo hull has a pre-made carrier design, which becomes a beast when it can equip two carrier modules for only five logistical points. To make a carrier fleet even stronger, consider adding supportive jamming modules. The Interceptor drones (Interceptor, tiny, beam) will not protect their motherships, and Guardian drones (Guardian, tiny, kinetic) do too little damage, so the Assault drones seem the more effective alternative.

Blueprints

Blueprints are predetermined ship designs that are automatically adapted in order to take advantage of your empire's latest technological advances.

Prototype Blueprints

Prototypes are ships that use one or more copies of a galactic resource to mount powerful versions of beam, missile, and mass driver weapons that are far more effective than anything else at an equivalent tech level.

Support Blueprints

Many blueprints have support variants, which sacrifice raw firepower and defenses for support modules that boost their entire fleet's combat capabilities.

Modding

Blueprints are defined in the game's XML data files. Experienced modders may be able to alter blueprints to suit their needs.