Modded StarDrive 1: Starting Out As The Opteris

So you’ve dusted off your old copy of StarDrive 1, downloaded the eXemplary Black Box and Combined Arms mods for it, and are in need of some help? Fear not, our friend Trifler has come up with this starter guide to help you out.

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This is the third in a “Starting Out As” series for StarDrive with the Black Box and Combined Arms mods. The Humans and the Ralyeh were up first, but now it’s time for the Opteris! Some concepts are covered in all of them so they can be read in any order. This one primarily focuses on designs that use energy weapons. That said, there have been a lot of changes since the last one in this series. This one was written using version 1.30 of Black Box and Combined Arms 7.6F.

Changes I Noticed

The developers for these two mods have been working hard non-stop. Here is a quick rundown of the changes I noticed while working on this. I don’t have any patch notes, so this is only from observation. If this is your first time playing, you can skip to the Intro section.

• Ship maintenance has changed from being a flat cost based on the number of hull squares a ship has to being based on the Production cost. This is a big change and required me to rethink some things. In this version at least, fighter shields are very expensive. I was able to work with it as the Opteris, but I worry that this seems like a massive nerf to the Vulfar, who already had a hard time. Hopefully they’ll take a look at doing something to help the Vulfar out.
• The space background and dust clouds look better, including in the Shipyard.
• New engine trail effects
• Using a Small Warp Engine and a Small Combat Engine is no longer better than two Small Engines.
• I’m not sure if weapons across the board were made less accurate or if the meaning of 1.0 accuracy was changed, but the numbers are higher.
• The behavior of the “Attack Runs” order seems to have been changed so that ships don’t fly past the target and then turn around anymore. They now seem to approach to point-black range and remain facing the target while slowly strafing left or right. My biggest complaint with Attack Runs before was they would fly past the target and right into the middle of the enemy fleet, where they would get annihilated. So this is good. I just don’t know if “Attack Runs” is still a good description for it.
• Ships now seem to combine all of their shield HP into a single pool. Before, each shield circle’s HP was independent from the others. I asked about this on the forums and was told that it’s probably a bug and we should expect it to get changed back. However, I later also noticed that when you add something like Solar Armor, the Shield Power stat on the right goes up, but the Shld Str stat for each shield generator on the ship remains the same. In the past these would reflect the Solar Armor as well, with the bonus shields divided between each shield generator. So this seems like a deliberate change. We’ll have to wait and see.
• The Prototype Beam weapon seems to have been buffed, which is great.
• All of the weapons with the word “laser” in the name still seem quite underpowered in one way or another though, at least to me. Even when I take into account that they don’t have to worry about ordnance. Blue lasers are perhaps an exception.
• Lots of balance changes in general.
• I’m sure there’s a lot that I didn’t notice.

Intro

The Opteris are cybernetic organisms, part machine and part organic. In StarDrive 1, this means they do not eat food. Instead, they eat production points. In StarDrive 2, they more logically consume 50% food and 50% production (they’re cyborgs, not robots), but StarDrive 1 was never changed to match. You can roleplay that the Opteris in Stardrive 1 got rid of all of their organic parts if you like. In game-play terms, not needing food means that the Opteris can completely ignore the Fertility of planets. They just don’t care. This is great because they prefer Barren planets. This makes colonizing as the Opteris very simple. It arguably might make them the faction that requires the least micromanagement, at least when it comes to colonizing.

In addition, the Opteris have some of the largest ship hulls in the game. This often results in lower speeds, especially if not taken into consideration with ship designs, but it also allows them to create designs that most other factions simply can’t. However, since the Opteris don’t have the trait to reduce ship maintenance costs, or the trait to help them make more money, those larger ships typically result in fewer ships in the fleet.

For this guide, I intend to focus on energy weapons, but I sprinkle in some other weapon types. Energy weapons don’t require ordnance, but they can be a tad trickier to design ships for.

Black Box now calculates ship maintenance costs based on the ship’s production cost, so efficiency is more important than ever. Maintenance used to be determined by the number of squares a hull has, so the maintenance cost of a hull was always the same, regardless of the ship’s design. Shields in particular increase maintenance costs quite a bit now.

Upon starting the game, I pause. I want to make sure the non-combat ship designs match the efficiency we would expect from cybernetic insects.

1) I immediately begin researching Scientific Foundations. Then I refit the starting scout by removing one nuclear reactor, which is simply unnecessary, to create this “Drone Scout A” design:

This design is faster and cheaper to maintain.

The Opteris need to send out a lot of colony ships, and it’s important to do so efficiently. To help with that I create this “Opteris Hivepod A” design:

Compared with the initial design, this reduces the production cost by roughly 20%.

I make the same change with the starting freighter to create this “Creeper Transport A” design:

I might have waited on the freighter until later with earlier versions of the game, but now it saves a good chunk of maintenance.

Now configure your Automation settings using the small “AI” button, just to the left of the minimap.

• Tell it to use the new scout design. I recommend turning on Autoexplore.
• Tell it to use the new colony ship design. I recommend leaving Autocolonize off.
• Tell it to use the new freighter design. I recommend leaving Autotrade off for now.
  • Autotrade is a little misleading. If you manually build freighters, they will still autotrade. What I’ve found the Autotrade checkbox actually does is auto-build freighters. I prefer to not have it spam-build the early freighter design, so for now I leave it off.

Some other things to start out:

• I suggest lowering the taxes to 15% to increase research and production, at least for a good while.
• I usually just set the homeworld governor to “Core” so that it will handle adjusting the Food, Production, and Research bars for me, as well as most production queue tasks.
• Queue up one or two troops or check the box to “Auto Build Garrison”. You will need to send them to planets with anomalies to explore them. Be aware that some anomalies spawn enemies (ground or space).
• Add a single freighter to the build queue.

1) The first research I recommend is Scientific Foundations. When it’s finished, the homeworld should build a Research Lab automatically.

• Advanced Education is less effective at the moment because the Opteris start with a small homeworld.

Regarding Colonies

• You can use the Planet Reconnaissance button to the left of the minimap. “L” is the hotkey. This gives you a list of all of the planets you know about. I like to check the Hide Uninhabitable and Hide Unowned boxes, then sort by Richness (as Opteris).
• I like to set all of my colonies to Trade Post to start with. I want them to adjust their own sliders and handle imports, but I don’t want them to auto-build buildings.
• Building production buildings on every colony is a waste of money. These buildings cost maintenance, so I don’t want them on any colony with a low Richness value. At the start of the game, I only want them on the homeworld, which is the only place building ships. Later, I pick colonies that can make use of production buildings efficiently, and then they will export production.
• Building science buildings only makes sense on planets with a decent sized population.
• I do build economic buildings everywhere (unless there’s no space), since they don’t have a maintenance cost.
• Biospheres, once researched, rack up a great deal of maintenance if left to auto-build. Each one has a permanent maintenance cost. To use them efficiently:
  • If a colony isn’t at, or near, its maximum population, then a biosphere isn’t going to provide any benefit, unless you don’t have any free tiles to put an important building on. Wait until colonies fill up before building biospheres.
  • Notice that the increase in maximum population that a biosphere provides is different, depending on how suitable the planet’s biome is for your people. I prefer not to build biospheres on planets where each biosphere provides less than 0.20 to the maximum population. In some cases, I’ll use them on 0.15 planets. Anything lower than that and I never build them there. Ever.

2) Next, I like to research Polymer Armor, immediately followed by Fighter Hulls I. To put the new Drone01 hull and Dual Cockpit into service, I create this “Drone01 V P1” (V for Vulcan, P for Polymer, 1 for Nuclear power):

These fighters are a significant improvement over the Drone Interceptor we start with. The Dual Cockpit improves the accuracy of the guns considerably. The armor provides a small boost to durability, especially when used en masse.

Fewer of these are needed to form an effective fighting force than with other factions, but they still require numbers to fight effectively. The early game is all about sending in a wave of ships at a time. It is worth retreating when losing to save time on building the numbers back up.

Some of you may be wondering about a design that uses the crummy starting shields, such as this one:

First, each of these shield generators only provides 100 HP, for a total of 200 HP. In my testing, I found that to be darn near equivalent to fighters that have no protection at all. On top of that, they increase the maintenance cost by over 40%. So, I recommend just using armor for now.

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When attacking, be sure to have your fleet warp to a location near the enemy, but out of sensor range, so they aren’t all spread out when you order the attack. Keep moving closer, trying to maintain group cohesion. I don’t recommend right-clicking on an enemy until either you’re really close or they jump towards you. Once the enemy is in range, have your ships focus fire, especially when fighting Remnants, at this stage of the game. Use pause, so you can right-click on targets.

Sometimes, with the Remnants especially, the target you’re focusing on will reverse at full speed through the middle of their forces, in an attempt to funnel your ships between theirs, giving them free shots at the sides and rear of your ships. When this happens (and it will get easier to spot once you’ve seen it a few times), pause the game and switch targets. This will become less and less of an issue as technology progresses.

When defending, your ships will automatically respond to enemy incursions based on their sensor range.

If it helps, you can slow time to 0.5x while watching combat, especially when watching to learn how ships use their weapons.

2) I like to get better colony ships early. Otherwise, improving them becomes a moot point. So, with a decent fighter available, I think it’s a good time to research Subspace Projectors.

As soon as that research is complete, open the Opteris Hivepod A we created earlier, replace the Colonization Module with the new Advanced Colony Module, and save it as Opteris Hivepod B.

Now put the new Medium Storage Hold module to work by creating this Creeper Transport B:

Be sure to go into the Automation menu and change the colony ship and freighter to the B versions. Turning on auto-trade and/or auto-colonize is an option now with the new designs, if you wish. Be sure to monitor your finances.

3) I find that money is a pretty serious issue for the Opteris. It can be hard to maintain a fighter group of any decent size. So, I like to research Economic Foundations so I can start putting Imperial Offices on every colony for a bit more income.

4) Now, to get more out of the fighters, I research Energy Weapons. With that, I immediately upgrade all of the fighters to this “Drone01 PB P1” (PB for Prototype Beam):

The game does give it a higher Strength score if you use PD Vulcans instead of the Small Red Lasers, and I did use them in my draft design. However, two things heavily impacted my decision to replace them: their range of 1150 and their projectile speed of 1100. The Prototype Beams have a range of 1700, so they really were a poor match. While the PD Vulcans have much higher DPS, that’s only if they hit. The Small Red Lasers, on the other hand, have a range of 1500 and a speed of 1500. It doesn’t hurt that they also don’t need ordnance, but that actually didn’t factor into my decision. The point is, this is another case where the Strength score doesn’t tell the whole story.

5) A corvette seems good at this point, so I think it’s time to research Corvette Construction. This will allow the creation of the following Worker PB P1:

I find that this design is a large step up from the PB fighter. The armor helps a lot with survivability. The Small Red Lasers are definitely a secondary weapon.

I also found these quite effective against Remnants. They quickly destroy two, but like all early designs, they have trouble when the remaining Remnants start backing up. One thing you can do once they start backing up is to select half of your force and order them to warp to a point a ways behind the Remnants, while the other half maintains pursuit. Alternatively, you can order a retreat to repair, replace losses, and go again.

6) This is about when I like to research Advanced Education and slap a Planetary Education Center on the home world. This will improve research and production a bit. It’s also a prerequisite for other buildings that increase a colony’s maximum population. In the long term, things like Mega Cities and Hive Cities are particularly good for the Opteris because degrading planet fertility is irrelevant for them. Those take a good while to get though.

7) Now, it’s time to pick up Energy Shielding. Shields have less HP than armor and increase the maintenance costs of a ship considerably, but they protect a large area. For our corvettes, they’ll offer some protection for the entire ship, rather than just the nose.

This is a short-term interim design until Fusion Reactors are available. If you’re not at war, I recommend skipping it.

This design adds 600 HP of shields. Each shield does not fully protect the other side, but they offer a little protection to the sides and rear, assuming they haven’t already been depleted from shots to the front. The main benefit I found in combat tests was that they helped protect the two outer Prototype Beams from being taken out quite as quickly. Since each shield generator replaces a laser, no extra power is required. The downside is the higher maintenance, and to a lesser extent, the higher build time. As of the version at the time of this writing, the maintenance increases from 0.30 to 0.36.

8) Let’s research Fusion Reactors. I always have an internal debate on whether to get frigates first, but in this case, researching fusion first will allow upgrading the PB corvettes to 1000 HP shields before undertaking the long frigate research. Once that’s done, you can upgrade to this “Worker PB ES 2”:

The new fusion Fighter Generators save enough space to use a 2×2 shield generator instead of two 1x1s. This shield fully covers the ship in a single 1000 HP bubble, instead of two overlapping 300 HP bubbles. The maintenance is also more efficient.

Since there unfortunately aren’t any defense platform weapons in the energy weapon tree, you’ll find that you still won’t have anything better than the default Small Defense Platform Mk1a. If we can’t get a better weapon, we can at least make that weapon more accurate. Here is my “SDP K 2” design:

You can read a lot more about orbital defenses by checking out the addendum on defense platforms.

9) Begin research on Frigate Construction. This project takes a while, but it’s a necessary next step, and frigates will be a substantial addition to our arsenal.

The first frigate I came up with had lots of 2×2 laser turrets, but I found I liked the following design covered with Kinetic Turrets better. Here’s the first fusion version, the “Soldier K ES P2”:

I did create a nuclear-powered version as well, but it became pointless once I decided to go with researching fusion before frigates.

This design packs a very respectable punch and is quite versatile. I originally put a flak turret on the front, but it was pretty useless so I changed it out. This is a very Opteris design, as only a couple of the other species, I think the Kulrathi and the Pollops, have frigates that can make use of 2×2 weapons like this. The first Human frigate, for instance, is heavily focused on 1×3 weapons.

During testing, I did notice that all of the shield HP was depleted before the armor started taking damage. When I played previously, each shield generator had its own HP pool, so after the first 1000 HP was depleted, the front of the ship would take damage until it reached the shield circle of the second shield generator, and only then did the second 1000 HP begin to deplete. I mentioned this on the Steam forums and I was told this is probably an unintended bug from recent changes. However, this was just a user comment and not from the mod developers.

Another thing you can do at this point is replace the engines on the Worker PB ES 2 corvette above with a 2×2 Medium Engine. This will reduce the maintenance somewhat since the Twin Small Engines have high maintenance compared with Small or Medium engines. They will continue to be a valuable part of the fleet.

Let’s take a look at a transport frigate. This is something I suspect a lot of people don’t think of, but you can use other hulls as freighters. The AI recognizes them as freighters too. Most species have freighter hulls that IMO are fast enough, but the Opteris Crawler hull is unbelievably slow. This is the first time I’ve created a freighter like this, but if you can avoid becoming confused from seeing what look like combat ships whizzing around between your planets, then I present the “Soldier Transport A”:

The Dual Cockpit and the Sensor are nice additions. Having a sensor on freighters helps keep an eye on things in friendly territory. The Dual Cockpit does provide more resistance to boarding than the Cockpit, but I don’t think it’s enough to affect pirate boarding actions. The pirate ships I’ve seen have two Assault Shuttle Bays.

Without using a non-freighter hull, I have a hard time seeing the Crawler as a better freighter than two of the Creeper Transport B freighters we’re already using. The maintenance cost and the cargo space of two Creepers are roughly the same as a Crawler, yet the Crawler is incredibly slow. I also dislike the Large Cargo Holds.

10) Let’s talk about energy cannons. By researching Energy Cannons, this “Drone01 BL ES 2” fighter that uses six Blue Laser Mk1 lasers can be created:

It packs a pretty good punch, but it can’t take much damage.

I think this is a good place to put a short little energy cannon tutorial, using the fighter above as an example. It’s not complicated, but there are a couple of things that aren’t explained that greatly hamper a design if not accounted for.

Pay attention to the “Pwr / Shot” stat. In this case, it says 25. This means that 25 power is deducted from the ship’s Power Capacity with each shot. Note this is per shot and not per salvo. So, you have to multiply it by the Salvo size. In this case the salvo size is 4, so that brings it up to 100 for each 1×1 blue laser. Since there are six of them, multiply that by six, for a total of 600. If there were other energy weapons, they would need to be calculated too. This means that the ship’s Power Capacity stat needs to be at least 600 for all six lasers to be able to fire all four shots in their salvo. Less than that, and some or all of them won’t be able to fire all four shots in their salvo. This is an important thing to keep in mind.

Initially, this fighter needs two Small Power Cells to reach this minimum of 600. However, with upgrades to power cell capacity, this can be reduced to one.

The Delay stat is the time the weapon remains idle between each salvo. For optimum DPS, the ship should generate enough power per second to fully recharge before the second salvo. In this case, it has 6.5 seconds to recharge that 600 power used. In other words, it needs to generate at least 92 power per second. Fortunately, the stats do keep track of this. As long as the “Wpn Fire Power Time” stat is infinite, you should be fine. In this case, you can also note the Power Recharge stat is 96 for this fighter, which meets the requirements.

A lot of the ship designs that come with the game that use energy weapons are hampered by not generating enough power to fire for more than a few seconds, so be wary of that. The Base Strength stat always assumes a design has enough power, so that can be misleading.

Regarding corvettes with heavy laser cannons: They have a really high Base Strength rating, but despite hours of combat testing with many different designs, I found that they just get massacred. Possibly they’re only intended to be used as anti-capital ship weapons. I wasn’t able to test them in that role. For anything else though, I found them inferior to pretty much any other weapon.

11) The use of carriers, in general, is an important part of Opteris lore as a hive species, so I’m going to talk about drones next.

Drones don’t exist in the base game. They’re added by Combined Arms. That’s why the Opteris have fighters called “Drone01” etc. As you might imagine, drones are only effective when used in large numbers. The Opteris don’t actually get any advantages with the drones themselves, but it fits their nature, and their larger hull sizes make it easier to create carriers.

There’s no point in researching drones until after you get frigates. Drones can’t be launched from planets. They have their own unique hull, command modules, and engines.

Researching Drone AI Command unlocks drones and the Drone Launch Tube that you can put on ships to use them. This also unlocks a default drone design with a Basic Drone Command Module, a Basic Drone Engine, and two Drone Attack Cannons (they’re actually autocannons). I’m not certain if everyone has the same drone hull layout, but all of the ones I’ve seen have the same four squares. This design works well enough, especially for a starting design. Each of these guns comes with enough ordnance capacity to fire for 48 seconds. For the Opteris, this design is called the Opteris Attack Drone.

I created this drone carrier, which can launch eight drones. In testing, I found I really needed at least four of them to make much headway in combat. They also cost a lot in maintenance. So, it may actually be better to just build four combat frigates, but hopefully they’ll get better with cruisers.

I originally had 10 drones, but I had to reduce the number to add more ordnance. The ordnance is important because the carrier uses ordnance to build replacement drones. It would be better if it had more, and ideally an Ordnance Fabricator, but that will probably have to wait for a cruiser hull. Although, you could send an ordnance support ship along that has an Ordnance Fabricator and at least one Ordnance Supply Bay to distribute ordnance to the fleet.

There are two upgraded command modules available: the Improved Drone Command Module and the Shielded Drone Command Module.

• The Improved Command Module generates and stores twice as much power as the Basic Drone Command Module. It also has twice as many hit points and can repair a lot faster. It’s unlocked by going to the Upgrades tab in the Research screen and researching both Deuterium Power Cells and Iridium Power Cells.
  • Researching this also allows dropping the number of power cells on the blue laser fighter above from two to one.

• The Shielded Drone Command Module adds a shield with 150 HP and improves the accuracy of the drone’s weapons. It has 3x the hit points of the Basic Drone Command Module. Power generation is slightly lower. It has the fastest repair rate. It also allows the drone to attack more than one target, but in practice that doesn’t seem helpful and I’ve never seen it happen.
  • All 1×1 armor blocks are available on drones. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to tell if adding a block of Solar Armor increases the drone’s shield HP, as there is no Shield Power stat listed on the right side of the screen for drones.

The following weapons can be accessed in the early game:

• The Drone Attack Cannon is only available on drones and is basically a less powerful version of the PD Vulcan. On the plus side, the projectiles do have a much higher travel speed. This weapon is unlocked with drones and doesn’t require any additional research.
• The Drone Cluster Bomb Bay is unlocked with drones and doesn’t require any additional research. This and similar drone bomb bay modules enable drones to make bombing runs on capital ships. However, they cannot attack fighters or corvettes at all, so this isn’t a useful weapon in the early game.
  • When using bombs, be sure to change the drone’s Hangar Designation setting (upper right in the Shipyard screen) to “AntiShip”.
• All of the 1×1 laser weapons are available on drones. They don’t have unique drone versions. Of these, the Blue Laser Mk1 is the only one that makes sense. Thus researching Energy Cannons is necessary for this one.
• The Drone Rocket Launcher is unlocked by researching Missile Theory.

I recommend setting any drone that uses ordnance to Reckless since the Kamikaze setting does not allow them to return when they run out of ammo. They just fly around doing nothing, and the carrier won’t replace it if it isn’t destroyed.

The main benefit of using energy weapon drones, of course, is that they never need to reload. How much of a benefit depends on how long they survive. 🙂

In combat testing, I found using a Shielded Drone Command Module with two 1×1 blue lasers completely crippled the drone. It doesn’t generate power fast enough and it doesn’t have enough power capacity for both lasers to fire their salvos. Thus, an Improved Drone Command Module is the way to go with these. Unfortunately, this means they can never get the shields and improved accuracy the other command module provides.

I don’t recommend using the default Bit Laser Mk1 design either, but it does work better with the Basic Drone Command Module than with the Shielded Drone Command Module.

Using a single green or blue laser with a Solar Array is possible with any command module, and a single purple laser can be used with an Improved Drone Command Module, but the damage is far inferior to just use dual Drone Attack Cannons instead.

There is one other drone upgrade I haven’t mentioned, the Improved Drone Engine. This can be unlocked under the Upgrade tab of the Research screen by researching Velocity Package II. However, it really doesn’t provide much of a speed increase. Only about 20 on most drone designs. It’s also a lot of research for such a minor benefit.

I found researching Reaction Drive under the Physics tab to be the first thing to go for when trying to increase drone speed. It provides a huge speed boost to drones (+200 in some cases). It’s also useful for the entire fleet.

I wasn’t impressed with the Drone Ion Pulse Beam, so I didn’t list it above. It has to use the Improved Drone Command Module to operate at its best. It takes swarms of them to be effective and underperforms against other drone weapons. It’s also just vastly more effective to use ships with Ion Beam Turrets than these drones. Maybe they’ll be worth considering if they give them a buff in the future.

There are more drone weapons, but they take a lot of research to get to. There’s a Drone Pulse Beam that’s unlocked with the Phasors tech. There are also several improved drone weapons under the Shotgun and Phased Defense branches under the Ballistics tab. There’s also a Micro Torpedo that might be a useful alternative to drone bomb bays.

Drone Base Strength

I find the way the Base Strength system works frustrating in general, but especially when it comes to dynamically launching units from planets or carriers. On carriers at least you have the option of choosing a design to launch. There is no such option for planets. But I digress.

In testing, I found leaving drone carriers on dynamic launch very problematic. I ended up creating duplicate designs of my drone carrier, with each one assigned to launch a specific drone design.

The most extreme problem of course came from trying to use blue laser drones. The Base Strength system doesn’t look at DPS lost from insufficient power (or ordnance), and it gives a massive boost to designs that use the Shielded Drone Command Module. So, the only way a carrier set to dynamic launch would use the blue laser design above, is if there were no designs that used the shielded command module at all.

12) A beam frigate is a solid addition to the fleet. Getting one does take a bit of research. While you can create one by researching Laser Beams, I found it really effective to mix in a pair of Ion Beam Turrets by also researching Ionic Weaponry. The ion beams are good against shields and once the shields are down, they drain the power from the enemy’s capacitor. Also importantly, they require 1/4th as much power to fire as the Laser Beam Turrets, which was extremely helpful. This “Soldier LB ES P2” is what I came up with after some combat testing:

The Laser Beams each use 240 Pwr/s for two seconds, so they use a ton of power. You do need several of these working together to be effective. Otherwise, they take a long time to kill enemies. I recommend mixing these into the fleet with the other designs, rather than trying to just spam a single type of ship. Solar Armor could be handy for this one.

Actually, you can forget about that one. I’m leaving it in as an example, but it pales in comparison to this next design. Just for the heck of it, I decided to try a ship with nothing but Ion Beam Turrets. Am I ever glad I did!

In testing, I found the ion beam frigate superior in every way to the laser beam frigate. I thought this would be a good support ship, but it turns out that it’s actually a good combat ship. IMO the Laser Beam Turrets should have their power consumption reduced. Switching to Solar Armor would be a good option.

13) You have a decision to make. Do you want to research Fast Shielding I or Heavy Shielding I? You can eventually research both, but regardless, one of them has to be done first.

Fast Shielding I will primarily benefit your frigate designs, and it unlocks the Shielded Drone Command Module. Heavy Shielding I will primarily benefit your corvette and fighter designs.

As the name suggests, Fast Shielding provides shield generators with a far faster recharge rate. Ten to twelve times faster, in fact. However, the hit points only increase by a little. The maintenance cost for the 1×1 generator is excessive in my opinion. Keep in mind that they still do not recharge while in combat. In the longer term, Fast Shielding I is a prerequisite for Battle Shielding. The shields under the Battle Shielding branch are the only ones that can recharge during battle.

Heavy Shielding focuses on increasing the hit points more than the recharge rate. They still recharge faster than the Energy Shielding generators though. There are no 2×2 heavy shield generators, so this tech isn’t good for frigates. They have a 1×2 or 2×1 shield that’s great for fighters and corvettes though, and a 3×3 that will be good for cruisers and larger hulls in time. One 1×2 or 2×1 shield generator is also cheaper to maintain than two 1×1 shield generators.

Here are some upgrades to incorporate these new shields:

14) I do have one major criticism and a couple of suggestions. I touched on it in the Drones section. The way the game calculates the Strength rating for ship designs, and the fact that you can’t tell it to not use certain designs to spawn units, especially on planets, combines to create a lot of frustration. More often than not, my planet will spawn fighters or corvettes from designs that come with the game, that I absolutely abhor.

When I say “spawn”, I mean spawned automatically by the defenses that then de-spawn when the battle is over, not persistent ships that are built.

There are a number of fighter and corvette designs that come with the game. I would love to have a global setting to tell the game not to spawn any non-player designs from planets or carriers. That would help a lot.

Secondly, it would be great to have a global setting, similar to the Automation menu, where we could choose a specific design colony defenses will use for fighter defense squadrons, corvette defense squadrons, and frigate defense squadrons.

While I’m at it, it would be nice if the toggle to display only player-designed ships would remember what it was set to when I reopen the Shipyard or Colony screen, including after loading a save.

15) Where to go from here? Well, I can’t cover the entire tech tree, and you probably wouldn’t want me to. I’ve shown you some solid ways to make use of fighters, corvettes, frigates, and drones. I’ve also covered ways to make more efficient freighters, colony ships, construction ships, and the like. As you unlock more advanced technologies, you’ll want to create updated versions of these designs to make use of them. You’ll want to try out new designs. Some you’ll keep, some you’ll modify, and some you’ll discard. Maybe you want to diversify the weapon types. Opteris frigates can make good use of the Type54 Auto-Turrets, for example. Also, as you move into cruisers and larger, using a mixture of different weapons becomes far more appealing.

Before working on Cruiser Construction, I recommend looking at some passive techs, such as:

• Reaction Drive, under Physics (If you don’t have it already)
• Subspace Theory, under Physics
• Shields Efficiency, under Upgrades
• Advanced Materials, under Upgrades
• Solar Arrays, under Logistics

Cruisers will change things significantly again, as frigates did. If you like carriers, cruisers have room for one or two Ordnance Fabricators. Will you make a cruiser that carries twenty or more drones? Or will you instead switch to carrying fighters, which don’t have to deal with the energy weapon constraints imposed by drone command modules? Will you create a powerful brawler, with thick armor, strong shields, and covered with weapons? Or a ship that makes use of the massive long-range weapons to support your fleet from afar? A support ship with lots of repair drones to repair your fleet during combat perhaps? A ship with a canopy shield to boost the shields of all nearby friendly ships? These things and many more are possible.

Also, depending on how the game is going, consider researching better defenses, both orbital and on the ground.

I’ll throw this in here for consideration too. Researching Disruptors will unlock the 1×2 Blue Laser Mk2. This allows the creation of this “Drone10 BL2 HW 2” fighter:

The game gives this a Strength rating of 192, compared with 106 for the previous fighter with six 1×1 blue lasers. Just a heads up that I think that’s overly generous. It’s not as good as two of them. Two of them would have more firepower, two shields, and since this is larger, it’s easier to hit. What’s good about this is even though it costs 30% more maintenance, that’s a lot less than 100% more maintenance by having two of the previous design. It’s also great for colony and carrier spawns.

The other species also beckon. Each one plays a bit differently, and they have different hulls. Some design ideas that work well with the hulls of one species may not be practical, or even possible, for another.

Trade treaties seem by far to be the best way to make money right now. I don’t know if they plan on keeping it this way. I’ve been struggling to earn much any other way.

Keep in mind development on these mods continues. You can expect further changes for balance and other issues, as well as fixes. I noticed some things are listed in lower case in the Refit menu for example. I’m sure those will get capitalized. They’ve been working hard, so a shout out to everyone working on these mods!

I’ve heard that Zero, the developer of StarDrive, may be working with them as well. I don’t know for sure, but if so, kudos to him as well. Maybe someone on the Black Box or Combined Arms team can let us know for sure.

Now go and prepare. The galaxy can be yours. Make sure you have the ships you need to take it.