Stellaris – Quick Guide to Ship Designing

Ship Designing 101

Absolute Start

To design a ship, Open the Shipdesigner, which can be found by selecting the fleet manager on the left side, then heading to the ship designer tab.

Here you want to turn off the auto-design option on the left. its for the best, trust me. Auto-upgrade on the right is fine, as it keeps your designs, but uses better parts when they are available. Next theres the ship types, and a button to create a new design. Sections can be swapped out for others with different slots in the top. For instance, a corvette could be set to interceptor, or picket.

Weapon Choice on a Enemy

First, check if your opponent uses armor or shields. This is easy to spot purely from watching their fleets in sensor range you see the orange and blue bars, and can even see their hp if you hover over them. If they use much shields, you bring anti shield or shield penetrating weapons.

If they use much armor, bring anti armor. Bypass weapons are often a good choice, but you wanna focus on having most or all of your weapons skip the shields and or armor for best effect.

Armor and Shielding

As for your shields and armor ratio, you either wanna get the intel on them to see their components or read the combat logs with them to find if they use more anti shield, anti-armor or bypass or maybe missiles then, you adjust your shields and armor as needed.

You wanna have more of what they arent effective at so if you find the enemy uses kinetics that damage shields, you go heavy on the armor. Armor and shield hardening reduce the effects penetrative weapons, but noone ever runs those unless they know they are facing bypass. Missiles skip shields, use point defence to stop them.

Shipclasses

Next. Certain ships are better countered by certain weapons corvettes, destroyers and frigates are vulnerable versus H and S weapons, you want high tracking. cruisers and battleships are vulnerable to L, X and G weapons mainly, raw damage to deplete their large hp pools.

A Rule of Thumb for Weapons

• S – Short ranged, shoots fast, high tracking.
• M – Middle ranged, damage, and fire rate.
• L – Slow rate of fire, long range, high damage, often a low tracking.
• G – Torpedos that skip shields and deal much extra damage to bigger ship classes.
• H – Hangar, high speed, nigh perfect tracking, good firerate, skip shield.
• X – The most devastating weapons for battleships, they can sometimes oneshot a cruiser, slow to fire.
• P – These slots arent meant for offense, but rather shooting down missiles and strikecraft. Point defense is good for the first, Flak for the latter.
• T – Big laser for titans, not much to say. X on steroids.
• W – Not a weapon. but used to destroy planets.

Ship Computers

They are a rather important but easily overlooked part of a ship design. As they change the entire behavior of the ship during combat, using the right one is important.

• Swarm, keep the ship in the face of the enemy, get some firerate boost. useful for corvs and frigs.
• Picket, I use this one for ships that are meant to destroy missiles and strikecraft.
• Line, I personally rarely use this, could be useful with M slots.
• Artil, stay at long range, get range buff. a staple for my battleships.
• Carrier, stay at extreme range, boost the range of releasing strikecraft, as well the range at which combat starts. I combine it with titan for the range of the lance, to combatlock across system.

I hope the above information was helpful. Happy gaming!