Empire is my favorite faction, I like the design best and its background story reminds me of Warhammer 40 000 universe.
So, by ultimate I mean that by this build you have only about 5-15%(85-95% left) losses(you can have zero losses if they behave properly), and the size of your fleet is less than half of the enemy fleet.
I have 4 types of ships:
Disruptor(praetorian cruiser)–>3 EMP cannons, 3 hi-speed point defense or scramblers, 2 target painters, 1 point defence scanner II, set to primarily target cruisers, retaliate
Annihilator(imperator cruiser)–>7 multiple warhead missiles, 1 target booster II, set to target cruisers, Disruptors give them persistently almost 300% hits, cooperative
Destroyer(centurion cruiser)–>5 imperial laser beams, 1 EMP shield, 1 hi-speed point defence, set to primarily target frigates, cooperative and vulture
Interceptor(weapons platform frigate)–>6 anti-fighter missile launchers, powered armor, only set to attack fighters, in escort or formation
All cruisers have 700-800 shields(I usually have Destroyers over 1000), combo of fast recharge and multi-phasic. Based on the composition of enemy fleet number of each type and behavior varies.
And Interceptor frigate is definitely the fastest way to get rid off enemy fighters, anti-fighter missile launchers greatly out-match any other anti-fighter weapon in terms of tracking speed and range.
Let me know if you think you have a better empire build.
EDIT:
Just found an empire build that can give you the highest honor on normal and hard battles in the game.
It gives you 0 losses, 0 damage with fleet 3- 4 times less in size than opposing fleet.
Unlike before just one type of ship, Imperial Blaster, 2-3 of them.
Orders: vulture, keep moving
In battles with lots of fighters , give them Phalanx anti fighter escort.
These sound like immobiles, given the long range emphasis and the use of the weapons platform hull. They wont have the flexibility to deal with players, especially the fairly common plasmaspam fleets.
Empire is indeed fun though
I like to use a beam/cruiser laser/rocket cruiser-wall, with antifighter/antifrigate frigates behind it.
Hm, do you think rockets would be a better choice since they fire more frequently, so if you combined them with target painters they would do more damage? I tried rockets before, but wasn’t very happy with the result but maybe I didn’t use them properly…
Also why would you use frigates to destroy other frigates, my Destroyer type does an excellent job in that department…frigates are really fragile, I just keep the Interceptor frigate(s) behind to deal with fighters.
I think this is a pretty versatile build in which Disruptors have the most important function, that’s why I named them Disruptors and thanks for the target scramblers tip, I’ll see how that works out.
Xol, you should post a couple of challenges with these. That’ll give you an idea of how effective they are by getting difficulty ratings from other players. Also, you might want to try using these designs against the series of SAC challenges. I’m currently playing through these. It’s a real eye-opener. One thing I learned by the time I got through SAC 10 was that “set designs” don’t really work very well. It’s best to be flexible. And the SAC challenges really force you to be flexible and adjust your thinking on a regular basis.
Just found an empire build that can give you the highest honor on normal and hard battles in the game.
It gives you 0 losses, 0 damage with fleet 3- 4 times less in size than opposing fleet.
Unlike before just one type of ship, Imperial Blaster, 2-3 of them.
Orders: vulture, keep moving
In battles with lots of fighters , give them Phalanx anti fighter escort.
Also, if you are going to use Imperial Blaster build don’t forget to spread them vertically so that you diffuse the enemy focus fire, each single Imperial Blaster can handle a lot of enemy cruisers and frigates.
The initial build of 4 types of ships is where you concentrate and stack your ships.
I can’t quite make out the total build of your blaster class, plus, on the left-most hardpoint, you have what looks like an engine on a weapons spot. Can you shed some light on that?
also, i’ve tried a few phalanx builds, but enemy fighters get into the middle of the 'blaster’s shields anyway and just pwn them…
EDIT: nevermind on the engine thing, didn’t know you could do that! Can you give a full loadout on the blaster and the phalanx escort fighters?
I did do it with Imperial Blaster build for 28 000 honor but I lost one ship and lots of escort fighters, total of 84% remaining(since engine speed is reduced it is not as effective like in other maps)
I prefer 0 loss, 0 damage in Chaos Nebula, no Rebel scum shall kill any Empire ship!
Well, you actually don’t have to have no engines since you don’t have to have all that armor, nothing even passed through the shields to damage the armor…but since they are going to be stationary there is really no point in them having engines.
Btw, if you didn’t know already, if you want to make ships stationary(when they have engines) use formation order and each should have a formation to each other, so that way ships never move, ship only moves then if the other ship you linked formation to is destroyed.
The picture above is perfectly fine, nothing is lopped off, you are probably viewing under small resolution, I guess right-click on it, save it and view it from your computer then…
Also with Imperial Blaster build you can replace one cruiser laser in the middle with imperial beam laser or proton beam to quickly kill frigates and destroy armor. And placement is very important, for example I distributed 6 IBs evenly vertically in 3 pairs of 2 where one is escorting other so effectiveness of guidance scramblers and single fighter escort on each pair is doubled when they move as couples.
Btw, I would really like to know if anyone has managed to get even higher honor with 0 loss on Chaos Nebula, hard.
you were right about the picture, a download showed me the whole thing.
I used your same placement (i think) and was able to get through without any losses, but i DID take a bit of armor damage. no biggie. I used vulture and removed frigate/cruiser targeting from the defenders.
thanks again for the great builds. i have been struggling to see what works with what here. I am amazed at how much those blaster builds can take with them before they go.
You have to make quite a bit of changes to not go with ‘cruiser lasers’ on the blaster build and still meet the crew/power reqs and fill all the hardpoints.
You can see from the pie charts that the greater the ship’s speed is the greater the enemy’s miss ratio is, this goes especially for plasma launchers, you can see this just visually how plasma weapons almost always hit stationary ships, but almost never hit Imperial Blaster with 0.22 speed.
As for orders it is very tricky to decide if you want to use cooperative or vulture, sometimes I find it best to leave out those orders and just set the target priorities, the more types of ships you have the trickier the orders get. There are a lot of hidden consequences of orders. Also, just because you have the same types of ships doesn’t mean they all have to have the same type of orders because of that.
Well I got much higher honor on Chaos Nebula Hard, (10K more actually for 38000 plus change), but I was using Federation and I did tolerate losses. I’m sure other races could do even better on the honor.
