How to Build the Best Fleets in Empire at War Expanded!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ย. 2024
- Star Wars: Empire at War Expanded mods, including Thrawn's Revenge and Fall of the Republic, have a lot of important systems to help you build better fleets and today I'll help you understand everything you need to know to set yourself up for succes
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Quick correction- I was using the Ion damage type for main Ion Cannons instead of TurboIon, where every modifier is 1. Overall point remains the same, but basically just even more true.
The obvious solution is to build the coolest looking ships for an aesthetically pleasing fleet, which will in turn give you a massive buff to everything because it looks cool.
No unironically
Just like the movies lol
Corey does not want you to know this, but doomstacking ISD-2s is a viable if costly strategy in campaigns if you don't get swarmed by the AI. Against players its not so good as they can usually outmanuver you and usually have >3 braincells.
Yes, if you're always going to outnumber the enemy then you can get away with spamming things and poor positioning (although ISDs are more spammable than most things because they're pretty versatile), but if you're going to be outnumbered in a situation where you need to prevent losses then that doesn't work and players regularly don't understand why them spamming just Venators isn't working
@@CoreyLoses Spamming venators absolutely works though, provided you´re spamming more than your enemy has😜
Ah, that explains the Tarkin Doctrine.
Idk ai feel like ISD-Is are more spamable. Lower point cost so you can usually field an extra one or a small handful of Lancers.
Also to be sure to kill off all your heroes
every so often corey makes a video begging players to please start using corvettes properly. Or just use corvettes.
And everytime I ignore him
I will spam out my beloved Carrick class and Carrick class only
Message received, deploying 300-pop corvette fleets.
@@TimberWolf99 godspeed soldier, carry on the good work
People are lucky eaw isn't a competitive rts else their dumbass big ships with no corvettes starts would get slapped on the daily
It's called, deploy 150 corvettes by hand. Repeat. Profit.
Based, dp-20s are good with some cr-90s too
mad man
I'll raise you 300 gunships. My PC cries for mercy.
While I think the classes and rock paper scissor sort of armament system in EAWX is neat, I wish fleet roles felt a little more diverse. I've noticed in the past few updates a lot of units have been given some unique abilities to spice them up a bit, like the Dreadnought getting brace for impact as opposed to the boring old power to weapons it had. Is that going to continue? I'd love for some more supporting role ships like scouts or jammers to have function and use in EAWX.
Who else here also miss when Acclamator II had visible extra turbolasers towers mounted on the top hull to show they were the heavier brawler variant to help distinguish from the acclamator I ? That was a great design. I hope it will be reimplemented one day as i absolutly adore these cruisers x)
Playing as the CSA, especially in the later eras, forces you to really choose your early fleet builds with care.
Those Bulwark Is are worth their weight in gold against MC80s and '90s.
Only reason I'm reluctant to use a lot of corvettes, particularly the anti-ship versions, is because it gets physically uncomfortable to click-drag 15+ of them onto the field every single battle. It's like this game's version of "spam X to not die" qte's. Especially bad playing as republic in FotR since you really need a LOT of CR90's to impede CIS swarms.
Additionally, small-ship focused fleets have the drawback not seen on any stat card: fighting the pathfinding. While normally not near as big of an issue in space as it is on the ground, the inability to lock groups of units into a formation will forever hinder the appeal of massed small ships since they depend so much on staying near fleet tenders to not be an economic attrition drain. If you move multiple ships into the same area, they tend to spread out and start spinning when they stop; so, you have to micromanage every single one to make sure it gets into the right place, which is fine when having a fleet of fewer ships, but doing so with a fleet with lot of small ships gets extremely agitating for each battle.
So, things like CR90's and DP20's don't feel worth bothering with purely from an ergonomic standpoint. Things with very high RoF lasers and fast point defense are great, but in my experimentation, anything a turbolaser corvette can do, a turbolaser light frigate can do a lot better in terms of practical application, even if they lose out in calculated DPS.
Another big issue are heavy frigates with short range weapons. Being ships with hardpoints, yet not enough shield or hull strength to really stand up to any punishment, they tend to feel useless unless they can act as carriers or have lots of rapid fire lasers. For example, Gladiators serve zero purpose: by the time they get in range, they've already lost half their weapons. Feels like they were given a retreat ability with their engine hardpoint hidden purely in acknowledgement that they're only good for dumping torps and running away once those hardpoints are inevitably gone.
One way i have learned to take out hordes of capital ships is to go in at an angle if you have a decent bomber force, you can take out most of their shields and the extra munitions tend to drain nearby shields. I think a lot of players forget about line of sight and that they can attack from different angles other than “jump right into their face” or “jump in behind them”(if you have units with the emergency retreat ability, you can drop in and agro two or three ships away from the formation before using the ability and having them alone for a bomber raid/capital ships). Its also allowed me to redirect their point defense ships from one more guarded end, making their formation break which can make a fight that much easier.
I actually get a real kick out of building Imperial fleets in TR as they should have been built if the Emperor had three braincells to rub together. ISDs are the battleship analogue of Star Wars, and all battleships always need escorts. One Lancer and one Ton Falk for every ISD you build covers a lot of the ISD's weaknesses, and then flesh out the rest of that fleet with ancillary ships to fill the rest of the situational capability needs like interdiction, smaller rapid attack ships and corvette screens, and extra escort carriers for those fights where you need enormous fighter and bomber swarms.
Add a centerpiece like an Allegiance or two that can face-tank a bit longer than the ISDs without swallowing half your battle pop cap, and you've got a fleet that can take on most things if you deploy the right things for the right fights. It's nice to have an SSD or praetor around; a massive ship can tank a ton of damage, but that tends to result in you killing enemy ships more slowly because you can't bring in enough dakka to kill enemy ships fast enough, which can sometimes land you with losses you didn't need to take.
I have a standard fleet load out a little similar to this as Empire.
1 single pop corvette
5 Isds. 2 ISD 2s and 2 ISD 1s and then hero ISD
10 Ton Falks
Then remaining cap filled with Galleons and Lancers. 2 Lancers for every Galleon
Kinda do the same with NR:
1 Mediator
1 Mon Cal Carrier
3 MC90's
Fill in the rest with New Class Variants like Sacheen, Majesties, Defenders and Belarus.
I rarely take space losses with these set ups.
It's the damn ground losses that baffles me. Even on captain, I feel like I gotta doomstack 30 high just to get a foothold sometimes.
Nice Guide. I'm still gonna spam Hardcell Missile Ships, but still nice guide
Hi Corey! I have two video requests after watching this - EAWX Weapon Deep Dive, one for ground, one for air. Although this video helped explain fleet compositions, it felt to me that it relied on knowledge of knowing what the different weapons do. It would help to know things like:
- Turbolaser types (ex. should I pick up something with Dual Medium Turbolasers over a Heavy Turbolaser? Is there a difference between a battery and a normal hardpoint? Does number of shots matter other than DPS?)
- Differences in missile types and use cases (proton vs concussion vs assault concussion), their roles
- How weapons with AOE work, AOE range, etc. (ex. do I need to target clusters of hardpoints? Is it only bombs that have it? Does it only work on things with hard points?)
- Faction specific / unique weaponry details . (ex. Mass Driver cannons, the Superheavy cannons, etc.)
I'd also imagine people might be more interested in ground battles if we have a better understanding of what the ground weapons can do as well!
1. You can think of turbo categories this way: heavy turbos are like artillery cannons, they are good for shooting at long range, targets, but they are as accurate as artillery can be; medium turbos are regular reliable weapons with balanced stats; light turbos are assault cannons, they are good for getting in close and killing stuff quickly, but the "getting in close" part can be a bit demanding. So really your choice is all up to the target you are facing and the strategy you are using, against corvettes, you'll have better luck with lights, against an ISD, you'll fare better with heavies. A quad turbo is nothing more than 4 turbos, but in a burst, that means it hits harder all at once, but may have worse sustained damage than those 4 turbos independently, bursts are definitely better for piercing shields and overpowering healing, but they can also be wasted on targets if they overkill it, whereas if you had the 4 different turbos it would be more efficient.
2. proton = anti-armor that hits harder but has shorter range; assault concs = anti-armor that doesn't hit as hard as protons, but is long ranged; concussion = anti-fighter & anti-corvette.
3. I don't know the ranges of AOE, that can be found out by looking at the projectile stats in the code, which is doable but a bit of a task, you do benefit from targeting clusters of hardpoints yes. Bombs are better at this. AOE can absolutely damage small ships that are all clustered together.
5.Super heavies are nothing more than heavies with its stats taken to the next level, which means more damage, more range, less accuracy. Mass drivers are generally good against everything on ground, and they are pretty good against shields in space while still doing hull damage, think of them as very small missiles that you shoot at rapid fire and that will help you visualize their performance.
I used to think a single ssd was enough to destroy fights. After a couple embarrassing defeats I realized Corey is absolutely right, you need a balanced fleet mix to adapt to what your enemy had there is no one "perfect" ship class that can take on an entire enemy fleet by itself.
these tips, though very helpful and overall absoluteley useful, imply that u actually pick and fight out battles against bigger/ more dangerous fleets and I dont know about you, but i usually just go in with big battlecruisers, destroy as michh as i can before losing the shield, retreat and repeat. especially in mid to early late game, its the only thing possible with active cruel AI, since they happen to appear with 15 new allegiances out of nowhere and would rip you apart in a full lengh battle
Agree
Those guerilla attacks to drain stacked fleets or "punitive expeditions" to devastate the enemy's outback are much safer with big ships
Doomstacking ISDs is valid … unless you have decent tenders or carriers in which case fine go small ships
hey i just noticed on my play through on fall of the republic right now that if i target a ship behind another one, it hits the target that is in the way, but doesn't seem to hurt the hardpoints individually but just damages the health pool as a whole reducing all hardpoints by the same amount. i just thought this vid might be a decent spot to bring this up and make u aware of it if not so already.
I usual set up a "Escort wall" of overlapping Light Tenders, the 1 with no hard points, with various corvettes, Escorts and any ship that doesn't have hard points in it. This is done before I deploy any capital ship who are behind said "Escort Wall" with variations on weapons for said ship. Lighters are closer to recieve some help from tenders why heavy are further back to support.
I do appreciate the video, and I have been trying to understand the roles of different ships, but I do also hate losing ships so my current build tends to be about 75% ISD spam, and 25% carrier spam with one corvette as pathfinder.
Get like 5 fleet tenders and you won't have to worry. A fleet of hardpoint-less ships under tenders is even more durable than a bunch of capital ships, because:
1. they are small and harder to hit.
2. when an ISD loses a hardpoint, its gone forever, it cannot heal that loss, and it also _loses some of its firepower_ for the rest of the battle; a hardpoint-less ship has nothing to lose, it's completely functional up to its last hitpoint, and if it manages to survive a small engagement, it can fully recover its hull _and_ shields.
3. hardpoint-less ships tend to be faster and more mobile, this means that they can both actually dodge incoming fire (although this is more luck than unit control) and that they can outright get out of the fight, something capital ships can only dream of doing, under the command of Thrawn or someone like that, a commander who gives them enough speed buffs (although they are going to increase ship speeds, which should ease that)
4. small hardpoint-less ships often have abilities, one of them is single unit retreat, this ability lets them take a bunch of damage and then just leave, the enemy can't destroy them. If you were gonna lose that unit, then you might as well have it retreat, it's removed from the battle either way, but it doesn't actually die, and after the battle you get it back.
My golden rule for my fleets is to have at least 10% of the fleet composition be corvettes/anti fighter. If I'm playing Thrawn's Revenge, 30 pop cap, in Fall of the Republic, 20. Now those are the minimums. A lot of the time I'm putting around 25-30 pop cap into my FOTR rosters simply because of the sheer number of fighters, but I think 20-25 is a sweet spot for FOTR. 30 in TR is usually my sweet spot against Imperial factions. It's important to have at least half of the 10% be corvettes since you'll have the passive point defense ability. For Example, as the Republic in my standard 200 pop cap fleet, I'll run 4 Victory I's or II's, 3 Venators, 5 Dreadnaught Heavy Cruisers, 3 or 4 Arquitens depending on what variation of Victory Class Star Destroyer I'm using, 4 Pelta Frigates with their point defense and anti-starfighter abilities along with some nice triple turbolaser support, 1 Pelta Support Ship for that interdictor ability and a healing point for any corvettes, 3-4 Arquitens scattered within the fleet to provide some extra support, 10 CR-90s with all that point defense, and a Charger C70 as a scout and then some extra turbolaser support where needed. I'll put those 10 CR-90s in between the Victory Star Destroyers on the front line and it protects them from the initial bomber balls the CIS sends, while also protecting against missiles from their annoying little ships. Behind them go the Venators and the Dreadnaughts and the Peltas deal with anything that gets through and provides cover for retreating corvettes so they can get to the fleet tender. The Victory and Venators deal all the damage while they get fire support from the rest. If I want to hit a side objective and split my fleet, I have a battlegroup of dreadnaughts and Arquitens that I can send to hit a small objective. Layer your ships to cover each other and they'll live through many battles. I've got a million of these fleet builds saved for each faction and I love seeing how much I can min/max them. Hope my build can help anyone looking for help.
super star destroyers have a pretty high skill cap. the key is to deploy the thing so that you're shooting through a 'bodyblocking' ship to get maximum hull damage with zero overkill. If you actively look for those opportunities, it happens pretty often.
Nothing can defeat the Ton Falk class spam.
ISD spam does brrrr
Any idea of possibly adding the OOM series droids as recruitable units for the CIS in Fall of the Republic, as a sort of improved B1 in terms of stats? Also other B1 skins such as the Kashyyyk camouflage?
I enjoy carrier fleets till the lag hits.
nah bruv i will spam quasars till the death of my pc. oh you think you can kill bombers. have you thought of killing 20 of them on the first pass with an escort of 50 various fighter/interceptors.
What I'm really struggling with are the lighter ships with hardpoints, I just can't find a decent spot for them in my fleets
I obviously put them in the middle of my fleet so they are still able to use their rather light weapons while not being on the first line of contact where I put my heavy tanky ships, but the AI still seems to focus on them quite often
It seems to me like the AI assesses how it can still deal as much damage as possible & mathematically comes to the conclusion that attacking my frigates brings more success than trying to destroy the capitals or battlecruisers that are in front of them (even though the capitals are in closer proximity, jumped in first & do more damage, but the AI seems to calculate that it doesn't have the strength to finish off said capital, so it focusses on the smaller ships)
Has anybody got a tip on how to use them properly or do they simply turn rather useless in the latter stages of a galaxy conquest?
It's gonna be dependent a lot on what you're trying to use, but generally speaking putting them behind rather than in the middle and then moving them up seems to work consistently enough for me.
Yeah like We Are The Ninjas said, it depends a lot on what the ships are, they have various roles, but you can often use a sort of "sword and shield" type of tactic, where you bash the enemy formations with the "shield" (a bulky ship, that they shoot at because it's in front of them being an immediate threat), and then you hit them with the "sword" (the small ships that generally can do some good damage, if that's their speciality)
On offense you can call in your smaller ships last, and the AI will generally try to keep beating on your capital/ battlecruiser ships if you call in your smaller frigates outside of harm's way.
Generally speaking the AI is ruthless and doesn't mind going "All out" to achieve victory (i.e. blitzing landing zones to capture it even if it means diving headfirst into your transport's turbolasers). In space it will try to push its corvettes forward to intercept concussion missiles/ spawn camp fighters, so you can keep your smaller frigates with light turbolasers a bit farther back and they'll still have enough range to hit the corvettes while being at maximum range from the enemy capital ships. This increases your small ship's effective health since those enemy heavy turbolasers are now at their worst in terms of accuracy. Having a fleet tender also increases that effective health tremendously.
That being said, even if your small frigates have weapons to use against capital ships, don't rush them at enemy capital ships unless their weapon loadout is purely anti-capital. Versatile frigates like the Dreadnaught, Tarrada, and Assault Frigate should be kept in the back to deal with bombers/ corvettes until you're ready to push out with them on capital ships that have been mostly defanged, or unless you are truly desperate.
If you're holding a position you can also try having them oriented to the side. This way, if they start taking hits you can move them back without having to worry about them driving forward into enemy ships before making a U-turn. The extra firing arc coverage also helps to punish bombers as they tend to zip by your ships to do another run.
Thanks for the answers
Seems like most propose what I mainly do, but even more careful or sending them in rather late in the battle
I normally create 3 or 3.5 lines: the tanks (battlecruisers) jumping in first (both in terms of time & location) to attract the initial aggro, then as an in-between-line the capitals like ISDs. After that the frigates form the 2nd line, mostly VSDs or MC80s since they are mostly anti-capital or rather tanky to function as a shield for the third line, the carriers
I position the VSDs as far away as possible so they are not in aggro range but can shoot their missiles or heavy cannons, but the AI often still moves up to focus on them instead of the battlecruisers & capitals directly in front of them.
& ships with smaller weaponry like the MC30A (hopefully the designation I'm looking for, I mean the one with the light ion cannons & turbolaser) I either put next to the carriers to use them similarly for their fighters (since the enemy is out of range to use their guns) or let them jump in when the biggest threats for them are already gone, but as active anti-corvette during the main assault I still have to rely on the battlecruisers (Allegiance goes brrt) or capitals which would be way better off fighting enemy capitals meanwhile instead, hence my question
@@cimcity1863 the comment on orientation is really useful, I've lost way too many ships due to that since I think about that too late most times
Got a question for you, in canon isn’t the Venator loaded with anti-starfighter weaponry/point defense? How come that’s not represented in FoTR?
All of its laser turrets are represented in its laser hardpoints, same as how all weapons are calculated for all ships
@@CoreyLoses oh gotcha. Thanks for the reply! Loving the mod btw, I’m in the middle of one of the bigger campaigns as the republic!
Waitwhat ions only deal 50% damage to capital shields now? Is this a .5 change?
No, Corey just referred to the wrong section on the sheet. It can happen, especially since the naming conventions are a bit confusing.
My zayne carrick-class ships are the only fleet comp I need.
Are Ssi-ruuvi playable at the moment? Those fighters look so goofy.
Not yet, they are still being developed. I've fought the Ssi-ruuvi and those fighters are wild, they are swarms of little un-piloted pyramid droids, they _shred_ stuff, very dangerous, rather "alien".
Hey Corey, are there plans to make the Mandalorians a playable faction in Thrawn's Revenge or the Fall of the Republic? Would you expand their roster with existing plausible or create new ones?
They'll be playable in Regan's Revenge but there's no plans to make them playable in the other mods
@CoreyLoses Could you confirm if fleet tenders repairing stacks? if i put corvette in repeir area of 2 fleet tenders will it receive twice as much healing? Also does fleet tenders work like repair stations from ground battles putting regen ticks alternately between units ( one tick one unit healed) or rather heal them simultanously (one tick all units healed in area)?
It does stack. Whether they heal one unit at a time or everything in the radius depends on the particular unit. Smaller tenders are single-target, larger are typically multi target, like the Altor.
No, no, I'm not eyeballing those Vong ships around 11:50...
Those are Ssi-ruuvi, dinosaur people, separate faction. The Vong ships are coral-like, models for them do exist, but they are not in the game yet. The Ssi-ruuvi are, you can generally find them in the southwestern Unknown Regions, to the west of Bakura, often causing trouble for the New Republic and/or the Eriadu Authority.
Playing as an Imperial faction, all you need to cheese on defence is abiut 10 Carracks and a habdful of IPVs. Shoot and scoot, Hypervelocity Cannon go BRRRRRRR
I just build fleets around the various dreadnaughts I have lol
Loves this video.
See, I genuinely didn't know the parentheses after the Hull points was armour class. I genuinely thought it was just ship class designation, which I just assumed related to armour. I knew about thr ion better for shields stuff already, thankfully. Is there a case where the ship class and the armour class are different? Or even armour and shield on the same ship? Is ship class technically a thing or is it just a role designation thing?
Yes, there are cases like that, especially when you start looking at FotR, where you have relatively large ships with weaker shields and hulls than you might expect from those. Mixed hull-shield types also exist, for those ships, it generally is the case that the shields for a ship kiiinda suck and their hull is better, but I'm sure you can find the opposite too.
Just use isd no other ships. Long live the empire
Does anyone know when they are adding the Yuuzhan Vong
Nevermind Corey already answered
I think we can blame players poor understanding of fleet make ups on canon itself always just using ships of the line on screen during the clone wars and imperial fleets. The rebels use better fleet make up but it’s seen as weak to the viewer because the ships are both smaller, outnumbered, and undergunned compared to the fleets of ISDs and swarms of TIE fighters they’re facing. To the average Star Wars fan who has only seen what’s been put to screen, the best fleets consist of one ship type spammed out and used as ships of the line.
*adds ONE Corvette to my fleet of ISD’s*
That good enough?
/s
Should have made lil' Jon reference
So here is the thing Corvettes just aren't worth the money because they only have anti-fighter capabilities and no anti-frigate or anti-capital ship abilities. Why buy 30 cr-90s which can only deal with fighters when I can get 5 assault frigates or Procusotors which deal with fighters almost as well as CR-90s and also have anti-capital ship abilities?
Because the fighters and bombers will kill your other ships. The other ships cannot actually deal with fighters anywhere near as effectively as you're saying unless they're specifically outfit to do so. Lasers are actually more effective against larger ships than the larger ships without lasers are against fighters.
TLDR spam corvettes
Bruh you lost Zsinj in episode two of your Zsinj game, I ain't listening to you.
Also, Enforcer Class Picket Ship Spam go brrrr
💀 Lol that´s so funny. He made the mod though.
enforcers ain't worth it when you can spam victories
@@Jin-1337 I just think they're neat (AND CHEAP as Pentastar)
I woulda of save scummed where he didn’t, I respect him for it
Also, in his defense VSDs are squishy and pull a lot of threat.
This is all meaningless.
The biggest problem EAW has is its reliance on hard points. It wastes sooooo much of incoming firepower...
Weapons are shooting on hard points that have health, ignoring the volume of already shot firepower towards it. Therefore essentially the majority of shots land on an already dead target and since there is no overlapping dmg spread (could it be added as mitigated dmg across the hit side of that ship? Maybe use the Diamond Borrow missile effect to some degree? ), those shots are wasted.
The time of travel + the number of weapons at one given time across entire/portion of a fleet ...
You can Instakill Golan 3 under 10s if you time the volleys right - just slightly ahead.
With some basic cheap micro, you can totally ignore the majority of these mechanics...
EAW needs to spread the dmg on target. Make it more than 25% bonuses/malluses to make it really work because of the sheer amount of firepower present at any given time. It could create mechanical differences as well, another axis - the amount of spread and vs what...
But hey that is probably too big of a change so in EAW2, hopefully...
TGhis is something I eveen address directly in the video, and which makes the differences between different ships even more pronounced. People also tend to overestimate how much overkill impacts ships short of SSDs, especially with 2-5 second average recharge times (so secondary salvos will almost always hit a new target if they first one was killed). It's mainly a problem if you just ctrl+a and target a single hardpoint, but part of this video is discussing how you can *avoid* that.
@@CoreyLoses yeah, I wrote it before I got to that point in the vid. Yet, from my experience, simple grouping and basic micro gets you to the overkill point anyway even in EAWX because of sheer number of ships present any one time. Maybe I should play more of the new version of EAWX. I havent played that much of the newer versions to be honest so my view might be skewed towards vanilla/other mods... as such experienced modder, your information has way more value. Yet, I cant shake the bias I formed from all other mods in EAW where my experience pretty much devolved into playing any mod the same way - because it just works which is really gamekilling in this case. As a mechanically-focused player, that point just kills it for me. Maybe Cruel AI could be the thing that would shake my approach towards EAW :D