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Does stacking many construction yards on a special constructor for the task of fixing the devastator moon make the repair go any faster?

Because I swear my 20-yard constructor currently trying to test this isn't making the component assembly go any faster than the old one-yard constructor.

Under Normal tech costs I'm assembling enough techs to build better terror stars (ahem GalCiv 2 lingo) out of, well, supply ships by the time the thing went from 220 damaged parts to 150. I shudder to think how badly it would have gone if I went under minimal tech costs.

As a side note, has anyone heard of an ETA on refitting an entire fleet at once instead of hitting M and clicking retrofit for every ship in your empire (if the fleet wasn't built in one batch, this is faster than actually bothering to look at the Fleet number, especially in the event that you are rich enough to afford it)?

...And going so far in tech finally spawned the Shakturi, in disguise. Well, time to test my (about to be built) terror stars on these guys... How many 3600-weight (900 of the 4500 is cargo bays, gas extractors and docking slots) terror stars (each costs a bit over 50K to buy lol) would you recommend going into the offensive? I've got about 15 I think building right now, and how many battleships would you recommend go with them when I send them in just before declaring war? I use massed missile and torpedoes, everything is set to Stand Off for all targets (token batteries of Titan beams but significant numbers of Terminator Autocannons), everything has a warp jammer with Cruiser and above having interdiction fields (which I really hope do not work on enemy ships while the user is in hyperspace, otherwise I'd refit all my empire's freighters with them and lol no fly galaxy), have maxed shield and armour techs and have significantly >10000 shields on the terror stars with 1/3 as much in armour. Other vessels are proportional, with 1500 size Battleship, circa 1200 size cruiser, circa 900 destroyer, circa 600 frigate and 399 for corvette. Right now I have 12 Battleships and 46 Corvettes, all fully modern. I am worried about the Shakturi reinforcement fleet that supposedly shows up if you attack them first.

Incidentally, I think I put myself in a no-win scenario because I didn't realize how the victory conditions really worked, so I set victory to 100% after 99 years... and I'm the frog people so declaring wars is a no-no for racial win conditions... Does this mean I have to conquer absolutely everyone else to win?

Does stacking many construction yards on a special constructor for the task of fixing the devastator moon make the repair go any faster?

Only one construction yard can work on any given project at a time, and each construction ship can only work on one project at a given time. It is therefore pointless to have more than one construction yard per construction ship.

Under Normal tech costs I'm assembling enough techs to build better terror stars (ahem GalCiv 2 lingo) out of, well, supply ships by the time the thing went from 220 damaged parts to 150. I shudder to think how badly it would have gone if I went under minimal tech costs.

The Super Laser is the only weapon in the game which can destroy planets, and you're not likely to have access to it without using a Devastation Moon, World Annihilator, or other similarly named ship (all of which use the same design, there's just a few different names for the secret construction sites) unless you're playing a mod or are using the Ancient Galaxy theme. The secret construction projects will therefore almost always have a niche that you cannot fill with one of your own designs, regardless of how much better a battleship your resupply ship is. Also, Super Lasers manage about 900 DPS across their full range band and have an alpha strike worth 30,000 damage (dropping to 27,340 at max range). Very few designs can even theoretically survive the first hit, and I'm not certain that the game doesn't just treat the weapon as an instant-kill weapon upon hit (it's a bit difficult to test, however, as Super Lasers are somewhat inaccurate even against large space stations). Super Lasers are also the only orbital bombardment option which can bypass planetary shields without requiring an invasion to remove the shield generator, though if you for some reason wanted to keep the planet, then it's not exactly an ideal option.

and I'm the frog people so declaring wars is a no-no for racial win conditions

Distant Worlds is one of the few games where you need not declare war to fight a war; you're perfectly able to attack, board, bombard, and invade the ships, stations, and colonies of another empire even if technically at peace. That particular aspect of the Quameno victory condition only cares about declared wars, though be careful to either limit the degree to which whoever you're fighting gets annoyed (they'll declare war if they get too mad at you), or just invade them with such overwhelming force that even if they declare war they won't last long (not usually an option, though planet killers can help remove hard-to-take targets like homeworlds).

As far as fighting the Shakturi goes, I tend to feel as though your fleet is too small unless the Shakturi are unable to launch any attacks of their own. 15 size-4500 Resupply ships is an impressive force if the ships are well-designed (at least on paper), but they can only be in a maximum of 15 places at once and are overkill to an incredible degree against most targets, and your regular fleet is somewhat tiny. I'd also be somewhat concerned about the designs in use. You very rarely need 'large' batteries of any PD weapon; the computer's designs and fleets rarely ever make heavy use of fighters unless you're playing a mod that alters the templates, which means that a lot of that may just be wasted space. Most of the time, just a few PD guns (maybe 5, tops) per ship is plenty. Nor am I convinced that your 'corvettes' are necessarily going to be of any significant value against the Shakturi navy if employed without the support of one of the 'battleships' or a 'terror star,' or in a force of less than perhaps 10 'corvettes,' though they'll probably do just fine against mining stations and maybe against the fleets of any surviving bug empires that choose to join the war on the side of the Shakturi. If you go for a fleet expansion, I'd suggest going for the size-900 destroyers (or maybe the size-1200 cruisers or size-600 frigates) rather than either the size-1500 'battleships' or the size-400 'corvettes,' as the sizes of the frigates/destroyers/cruisers look reasonable for going up against Shakturi ships one on one (with max tech, they might even manage to do somewhat better than that, though not perhaps with a sizable battery of PD weapons).

which I really hope do not work on enemy ships while the user is in hyperspace, otherwise I'd refit all my empire's freighters with them and lol no fly galaxy

I'm not convinced that the Gravity Well Projectors work as described in the tech tree; they don't seem to prevent ships from jumping or pull ships out of hyperjumps, just prevent hyperjumps from landing in the area of effect.

ORIGINAL: Aeson
Only one construction yard can work on any given project at a time, and each construction ship can only work on one project at a given time. It is therefore pointless to have more than one construction yard per construction ship.

...Well shit. Thanks for the heads-up.

The Super Laser is the only weapon in the game which can destroy planets, and you're not likely to have access to it without using a Devastation Moon, World Annihilator, or other similarly named ship (all of which use the same design, there's just a few different names for the secret construction sites) unless you're playing a mod or are using the Ancient Galaxy theme. The secret construction projects will therefore almost always have a niche that you cannot fill with one of your own designs, regardless of how much better a battleship your resupply ship is. Also, Super Lasers manage about 900 DPS across their full range band and have an alpha strike worth 30,000 damage (dropping to 27,340 at max range). Very few designs can even theoretically survive the first hit, and I'm not certain that the game doesn't just treat the weapon as an instant-kill weapon upon hit (it's a bit difficult to test, however, as Super Lasers are somewhat inaccurate even against large space stations). Super Lasers are also the only orbital bombardment option which can bypass planetary shields without requiring an invasion to remove the shield generator, though if you for some reason wanted to keep the planet, then it's not exactly an ideal option.

I meant terror stars in terms of just rushing in and blasting all enemies out of the way.

How does the game treat shields vs lasers? Because you're making me tempted to pack 30,000 shields on a dreadnought to test this...

Distant Worlds is one of the few games where you need not declare war to fight a war; you're perfectly able to attack, board, bombard, and invade the ships, stations, and colonies of another empire even if technically at peace. That particular aspect of the Quameno victory condition only cares about declared wars, though be careful to either limit the degree to which whoever you're fighting gets annoyed (they'll declare war if they get too mad at you), or just invade them with such overwhelming force that even if they declare war they won't last long (not usually an option, though planet killers can help remove hard-to-take targets like homeworlds).

You're not bullshitting me? HOLY CRAP. Okay I'm going to load up on HyperDeny and build a total of like 60 of my 4500-size dreadnoughts (and probably a few fleets of cruisers, my Homeworld has the 3x speed wonder and the spaceport there has like 24 slots and then jumping into the Shakturi's system and blowing all their faces off at once then.

As far as fighting the Shakturi goes, I tend to feel as though your fleet is too small unless the Shakturi are unable to launch any attacks of their own. 15 size-4500 Resupply ships is an impressive force if the ships are well-designed (at least on paper), but they can only be in a maximum of 15 places at once and are overkill to an incredible degree against most targets, and your regular fleet is somewhat tiny. I'd also be somewhat concerned about the designs in use. You very rarely need 'large' batteries of any PD weapon; the computer's designs and fleets rarely ever make heavy use of fighters unless you're playing a mod that alters the templates, which means that a lot of that may just be wasted space. Most of the time, just a few PD guns (maybe 5, tops) per ship is plenty. Nor am I convinced that your 'corvettes' are necessarily going to be of any significant value against the Shakturi navy if employed without the support of one of the 'battleships' or a 'terror star,' or in a force of less than perhaps 10 'corvettes,' though they'll probably do just fine against mining stations and maybe against the fleets of any surviving bug empires that choose to join the war on the side of the Shakturi. If you go for a fleet expansion, I'd suggest going for the size-900 destroyers (or maybe the size-1200 cruisers or size-600 frigates) rather than either the size-1500 'battleships' or the size-400 'corvettes,' as the sizes of the frigates/destroyers/cruisers look reasonable for going up against Shakturi ships one on one (with max tech, they might even manage to do somewhat better than that, though not perhaps with a sizable battery of PD weapons).

Well, the tiny fleet is from playing in a Peaceful galaxy with no pirates or creatures, I'm just trying to learn the ropes (glad to stumble onto the supply ship exploit this early in my DW career though, will use it on all subsequent games to cheese)

The "dreadnoughts" look like this now:
Mk 3 (after replacing most of the sort-range weapons) 50/22 sprint/turn, 10240/3520/13x18 shields/armor/ion defence, 1 Death Ray, 1 Devastator Pulse, 10 Advanced Fighter Bay, 8 Assault Missile, 34 Plasma Thunderbolt, 2 Titan Beam, 4 Autocannon

Originally a large secondary battery existed in the unlikely event that the torpedo/misisle battery guidance is wonky and I need to close in. I just realized that to actually repair anything it needs all 3 types of manufactories, so replaced 9 Titan Beams and 14 Autocannons for factories, then shaved more down for the Warpdeny and a few main armament weapons for extra reactors. What do you think of the design? I have yet to experience ship-to-ship combat so decided to use a variety of weapons (well, that I've reached the top in at least) just in case...

Battleships (Mk 3 now)... 50/22 speed/turn, 7040/2480/8x18 shields/armor/ion defence, 2 repair bots, 8 Assault Missile, 18 Plasma Thunderbolt, 1 Titan Beam, 2 Autocannon.

Cruisers size 1197 (9 habitat/life supports)... hyperdeny adding... 51/23 speed/turn, 5120/1840/4x18 shields/armor/ion defence, 2 repair bots, 8 Assault Missile, 18 Plasma Thunderbolt, 1 Titan Beam, 2 Autocannon. Less defence, no gravity well or rec center, but same weapons as Battleship (lol engines take up so much damned space on heavy ships).

Destroyers 931 (7 habitats)... 85/25 speed/turn, 3840/1320/2x18 shields/armor/ion defence, 1 repair, 6 Assault Missile, 14 Plasma Thunderbolt, 1 Titan Beam, 2 Autocannon. No more fleet systems here or ultra-long scanners, also -1 Reactor.

Frigate 665 (5 habitats)... 88/25 speed/turn, 2560/1000/1x18 shields/armor/ion defence, 1 repair, 2 Assault Missile, 10 Plasma Thunderbolt, 1 Titan Beam, 1 Autocannon.

Corvette 399 (3 habitats)... 88/24 speed/turn, 1600/640/1x18 shields/armor/ion defence, 1 repair, 2 Assault Missile, 6 Plasma Thunderbolt, 1 Autocannon.

Adjustments were made after observing Shakturi Destroyers had 43 speed listed and Frigates were 76, so it was pointless for my capitals to be 50 speed and lighter ships 60-some, adjusted destroyers and lower to be 85+ speed sub-light as a result.

Now that I look at the numbers, before I changed the lower classes speeds, the Corvettes appeared to be basically filler/cannon fodder/practice designing ships and weighing needs for both long range and PD (now that I've learned PD is almost non-existent in this game though...) and have good protection/DPM per cost to be meat shields, while Dreadnoughts and to a degree Battleships are basically single-unit damage sponges to screen everything else... oh and Dreadnoughts provide fighter cover too.

I think it's because I demanded far, far too much speed and protection in capital ships that firepower scales poorly. Still it seemed the Destroyers before the speed change, and now a mix of them and cruisers, will be the main killers of my fleets in terms of DPM per unit cost.

Now to go refit my ludicrously fast capitals to the new standards of having more reactors and such...

I'm not convinced that the Gravity Well Projectors work as described in the tech tree; they don't seem to prevent ships from jumping or pull ships out of hyperjumps, just prevent hyperjumps from landing in the area of effect.

Well then Hyperdeny's going on the Mk 2 Dreadnoughts and Mk 3 Battleships.

...Okay I managed to kill not only the Erutkah without them getting reinforcements (so before Shakturi reveal) but also the framerate.

889 warships led by 15 dreadnoughts and 50 battleships of the pattern specified above was too much for the computer, and since I had no idea how ground assaults worked I used 17 MORE transports (i.e. basically battleships minus some weapons, armor, all the fleet support systems, traded for troop bays each with 6400 troop capacity so the assaults were on the order of 50,000 (forgot to train enough troops beforehand) to 1000 for their homeworld and vs 200 for one world they took off the pig-snouted apes before I jumped my main fleet into their main system.

Annoyingly your fleet doesn't actively target neutral enemies unless you order them to or the enemies shoot them first, and with 5 FPS at best, well... the best I could do was target each Erutkah fleet as they come in trying to save their homeworld due to my frame rate. Shooting the left over single ships was up to pausing, zooming in and ordering one dreadnought after each ship.

Next time I'm just bringing a dozen dreadnoughts as a standard attack fleet and everything else can be patrol boats for their respective systems (i.e. 1 battleship and 1 destroyer per system, the destroyer to lock the enemy from jumping and keep them stuck due to being faster before the battleship gets there).

10240/3520/13x18 shields/armor/ion defence

So if I'm reading this correctly, you have 32 fully-upgraded Meridian Shield generators, 88 Ultra-Dense Armor plates, and 13 unupgraded Ion Defense components? I'd suggest dropping at least ~50 of the armor plates (which, incidentally, will likely reduce the cost of the ship, as armor is one of the most expensive components you can add to a design) and ~10 of the ion defense components, and using the space for something else (more weapons, more shields, more drive components, whatever). Railguns and graviton weapons are the only weapon types that bypass shields, and of those, graviton weapons don't care about armor and railguns don't have the range to be a threat to anything that isn't allowing the range to close. As far as the ion defense components, adding more than one only matters for redundancy, and by the time you're likely to have lost two or three of the same small component you've likely lost so much of the rest of a size-1500 ship that preserving its performance against ion weapons isn't going to matter. My own ships get 5-20 plates of armor and 1-3 ion defense components even on the very high end of the scale unless I'm intent on filling up space and don't have anything more useful that I'd rather install in available space or am unwilling to sacrifice a handful of armor plates to fit. Even most of my station designs, including the large spaceports, never exceed maybe 40 armor plates; almost everything has to chew through shields before armor, and the only things that aren't are either short-ranged (railguns) or lose effectiveness against large targets (graviton weapons in general) or both (graviton and resonant graviton beams). I also see no mention of S2F4 (or, better, S2F7) Repair Bots or Damage Control Units; the former are especially valuable, as repair components allow your ships to repair themselves while engaged in combat and both repair and damage control components reduce the amount of damage received per shot by the ship's components (note that these components do not stack; get two or three for redundancy, but not more than that). I also don't see any mention of a second command center or two (it really, really sucks to lose such a large investment because you're too cheap to install one or two extra command centers to keep the ship from going dead to a lucky hit; a ship that loses its last command center is incapable of fighting, maneuvering, or escaping, and so is effectively dead, though it will still absorb fire until destroyed so I suppose there's still some marginal utility in the vessel) or a spare hyperdrive (less likely to be stranded by a lucky hit; big things like size-4500 resupply ships have the space for such luxuries, though they're perhaps not worth the cost on small ships like your size ~600 frigates or size ~400 corvettes). Defenses look to me to be a little thin for a ship this size, though in all honesty it probably doesn't matter too much; the ship's unlikely to find a comparably strong opponent in anything less than a large fleet or a large spaceport and associated defense bases.

As far as the dreadnought's armament goes, it looks okay, but I'd suggest being careful using area weapons, particularly the Devastator Pulse. Area weapons are capable of friendly fire, and the Devastator Pulse is not something that you want to accidentally hit your ship, though the game is supposed to be better at avoiding friendly fire than it used to be. I might suggest tossing in a couple of tractor beams, as tractor beams will help prevent ships from closing if the dreadnought is attempting to flee, maintain standoff range, or remain beyond the opponent's weapon range and will pull ships in and keep them from fleeing if the dreadnought wants to close the range. I'd also consider dumping the two Titan Beams, because two Titan Beams contribute more or less nothing when you already have 34 Plasma Thunderbolts, 8 Assault Missiles, and 10 Advanced Fighter Bays; the survival time of anything that reaches Titan Beam range is not going to be materially affected by the presence or absence of that minor secondary battery. If you're going to keep the secondary battery, make a proper anti-ship secondary battery (say by filling the space you gain by dumping ~50 plates of armor and ~10 ion defense components with Titan Beams and maybe a reactor, or by trading out some of the torpedoes). If you keep the Titan Beams (which will get the ship to close if it's on 'all weapons' against something), then I'd consider dumping the Death Ray instead; Death Rays are perhaps too heavily focused on a big alpha strike to be reliable, as they're somewhat inaccurate (likely no more so than a Titan Beam, but for 140 space you get a lot more Titan Beam shots than Death Ray shots even if you have to fit an extra reactor in there) and slow-firing, even though their power requirements are quite low.

I will also add that I personally don't particularly care for the Death Ray and Devastator Pulse (the two most commonly available superweapons). For the most part, the only thing that the superweapons have going for them is their alpha strike; from the midgame onwards, most similar standard weapons have superior maximum sustained DPS and at least comparable range if you invest a similar amount of size, and standard weapons, having so many more shots/s for the same size invested, are less luck-dependent for their performance.

Also, from your cruiser description, it sounds as though you have a recreation center on the battleships and dreadnoughts? Recreation centers are pointless on anything that isn't a resort base or permanently orbiting a colony. It's fine if you want to have it for 'realism' or something like that, but be aware that there's no real point in it being included in the design of any ship except as a noncritical component that might be destroyed by damage before something more useful (of course, having two of the 'more useful' somethings would in my opinion be better, even if the only value added by the additional 'more useful' component is in redundancy).

More general comments:
All of your ship designs look as though they could probably afford to drop armor for more of something else. You really don't need more than maybe 20-30 armor plates on even the most heavily-armored ships, and 40-50 is pushing it even on most stations (there is a case to be made for extremely heavily armored stations that get placed in regions where they're unlikely to receive shipments of fuel and energy collectors won't work, but I personally don't feel that there is much point to it even then).

For any given speed target, you require a constant fraction of a design's overall size to achieve that speed target using a given primary drive component. If spending 30 size on a size-300 ship gets you 30 speed, spending 150 size on a size-1500 ship will also get you 30 speed. Turn rates scale similarly, though turn rates have a constant offset and so no ship will ever turn more slowly than 6 degrees per second. If you have a size-300 destroyer and a size-900 battleship, and the ships have the same speed and turn rates, and the battleship has less than three times the firepower of the destroyer, it isn't because you spent too much size on drive components. A lot of what you're seeing comes from dropping the Ultra-Long Range Scanner, which frees up 98 size and 110 reactor output - that's enough size to fit 8 Plasma Thunderbolts and enough power to cover ~3 of them. Dropping the fleet components and some of the redundant components also helps, but not nearly as much.

I almost always put two repair bots on any of my warship designs. A damaged repair bot can be repaired by the other component, and it's much more unlikely that both repair components will be disabled than that just one will be, reducing the need for construction ships on repair duty. I also prefer to double up the other one-off defensive components (countermeasures, ion defense, damage control if I don't have repair bots), though if I need space those can get cut, and once my ships get to be particularly large (usually ~600+ size), I generally start including a spare command center and sometimes a spare hyperdrive (also good for the "poor man's Torrent/Velocity drive," also known as a Kaldos + Equinox drive, which gets the speed of the Equinox and the responsiveness of the Kaldos, or roughly a Torrent/Velocity drive in a larger, more expensive but more available package).

Thanks for the advice re: armor.

Oops forgot to list the 4 repair bots the Dreadnoughts have (now, given I sued 2 on Battleships I feel vaguely insulted [:D] you thought I was dumb enough to forget them on the dreadnoughts).

I thought rec centers might hve a hidden effect on "crew performance" or something i.e. morale (like ship commanders have). Clearly I was wrong.

One of my Destroyers was fighting 3 Shakturi frigates at once and wasn't losing shields faster than it could recharge that I could see (or the game was bugging due to crap frame rate) when I was following it. This is probably due to Stand-off being default for all enemies.

I was worried there might be something that gives missile immunity or similar to, say, enemy fighters, hence the token Titan Beam and Autocannon armament (do Titan Beams even shoot fighters?).

Noted regarding command center and hyperdrive redundnacy, it just kept on giving me yellow warning so I was like "naw..."

Yeah, I feel I ludicrously over-invested on armour and shields after actually fighting the Shakturi and noticing their shields, and since I thought Ion Defence (I did research the improvement later btw) was additive i.e. a Ion Cannon volley of 180 would be stopped if you had 10x18... you can see where I'm going here (I assumed ion cannon effects bypassed shields, which was a dumb assumption of course).

Thanks for all your advice.

I assumed ion cannon effects bypassed shields, which was a dumb assumption of course

Ion cannon effects do bypass shields, but since ion cannons can't actually kill anything you can build (they can only temporarily disable a number of components) I didn't include them in the exemptions. Also, while I haven't extensively tested it, it would appear as though the shot damage of an ion bolt has to exceed the ion defense rating of the target in order for the ion bolt to disable anything on the ship, and the number of ion bolts hitting the target per time period does not matter as far as whether or not the bolts are effective; as such, unupgraded ion cannons would appear to have to be within about 40 range units of a target with unupgraded ion defense in order to disable components and if the target has upgraded ion defense then unupgraded ion cannons won't do anything; upgraded ion cannons appear to need to be within about 160 range of a target with unupgraded ion defense or within about 60 range of a target with upgraded ion defense in order to do anything. The area ion weapons might be more threatening; I've never looked much into area weapons to try to determine if the damage loss per range is on the distance from the center of the pulse (which I suspect to be the case without having looked into it) or on the distance from the ship bearing the weapon (which is how other weapons function). Plus, as with rail guns and graviton beams, ion cannon and ion pulse range starts to look kind of bad by the later stages of the midgame, and when you're playing with plasma thunderbolts it's fairly trivial to just never be within effective ion whatever range unless your ships are completely unable to control the range and aren't threatening enough to make anything attacking them treat your ship as a 'stronger' opponent (which, on default engagement stance settings, means standoff range).

Noted regarding command center and hyperdrive redundnacy, it just kept on giving me yellow warning so I was like "naw..."

Yellow is only "we don't think you need this" or "we suggest that you might want that" kind of messages (though if you ever get the one that tells you that you might want a hyperdrive, and you currently have any hyperdrive at all, it's probably a good idea to add a hyperdrive even if you don't fully power it), not the "you absolutely must do something about this" kind of messages, which are red. Having redundant command centers and hyperdrives is more or less a luxury, though, and I wouldn't bother on the small, cheap ships, or in the early game when it's harder to fit everything you really want into a design.

I was worried there might be something that gives missile immunity or similar to, say, enemy fighters, hence the token Titan Beam and Autocannon armament (do Titan Beams even shoot fighters?).

Every weapon in the game aside from pure-bombardment weapons, and maybe certain special weapons (swatting, or trying to swat, fighters with superweapons would be incredibly wasteful even if it killed each fighter in one shot so I'd personally prefer that those weapons not fire even if they can do so, I don't think I've ever seen graviton beams try to catch fighters, and I don't know that fighters are even vulnerable to ion weapons), can fire upon fighters, and there is no technology, component, wonder, event, or other means by which fighters can be rendered immune to any weapon type.

That being said, using anti-ship weapons against fighters is less effective than using actual PD weapons, and antiship weapons will prefer to fire upon real ships over fighters if they have the ability to do so. Fighters also have relatively significant countermeasures bonuses, so they're pretty hard to hit with standard weapons, making it even more wasteful to use antiship weapons as an antifighter battery. Titan Beams and other blasters make some of the best non-dedicated PD batteries due to the high rate of fire. Phasers can also work since the targeting boost helps them hit more frequently, though the low rate of fire is less than ideal, and I think fighters can be affected by the pulse of an area weapon if they're caught within the area of effect. However, since all that adding actual PD weapons is going to cost you is a few plates of armor or maybe a single antiship weapon, if you're concerned at all about fighters and have access to dedicated PD weapons, there's little reason to use antiship weapons as an antifighter battery. Heck, it may even be more effective to use the antiship weapons to kill the carrier instead of using them as a "poor man's PD" battery, as fighters will automatically take damage over time and eventually die once their carrier is killed (and they don't last that long after the carrier dies, either; they'll probably be dead ~5 seconds or so after the carrier dies at normal game speed, though I've never timed it to get a better estimate).

Oops forgot to list the 4 repair bots the Dreadnoughts have (now, given I sued 2 on Battleships I feel vaguely insulted you thought I was dumb enough to forget them on the dreadnoughts).

I thought you probably had some since it was listed for the other ships, but since they weren't listed I figured I'd say something just in case. I've occasionally forgotten other fairly important things if designing a ship from the ground up, and sometimes if upgrading an existing design (did we not already install countermeasures/damage control/ion defense on this? oh, the design's that old? oops).

One of my Destroyers was fighting 3 Shakturi frigates at once and wasn't losing shields faster than it could recharge that I could see (or the game was bugging due to crap frame rate) when I was following it. This is probably due to Stand-off being default for all enemies.

I was more concerned about your smaller ships fighting the Shakturi cruisers and capital ships; Shakturi frigates are nothing terribly special, and your destroyers are pretty big even for an endgame ship of one of the standard warship types (not huge, but as I'm sure you've noticed, the computer doesn't necessarily build its ships out to be as large as possible). Also, when I suggested building up your navy, I had thought that you'd intended to wait for the Shakturi to reveal themselves; just the 15 or so Resupply Ships would likely have been sufficient on their own to take the 'Eruktah Refugees' when restricted to their homeworld, but waiting for the reveal would have meant that you'd likely have had to deal with being attacked by several forces which would probably each have been strong enough to pick off a lone resupply ship or a collection of the corvettes and battleships of your original 12-battleship 46-corvette navy. If you find yourself looking for a challenge in the future, waiting for the Shakturi to reveal themselves and not using a battle fleet composed of resupply ships would help, as might going a bit less overboard on the fleet size. ~900 ships is a bit excessive; I don't know that I've ever had that many ships in an empire's entire starfleet, let alone in a single system. I don't think I've ever used more than maybe 60 ships simultaneously in a single system assault (though I would still suggest bringing comparable forces in if you're expecting a big fleet battle; really stinks to win the fleet battle but not have enough force left to take down the colony defenses or be forced to withdraw by enemy reinforcements because you didn't have enough of an edge during the initial engagement, especially if the engagement was out towards the edge of your effective striking range due to travel time or fuel issues).

I couldn't tell how many ships the "Erutkah Refugees" had at a glance and didn't feel like mousing over their fleets too many times (who knew how many more they might pull out of thin air!) so after I upgraded a pile of Starports I spammed full 16-ship groups at all of them (the starport design I was using then had 16 slots).

I thought the moment you actively began attacking them and they declared on you their reinforcements would show up... I realized too late that I had "a few" too many ships, and that I hideously over-engineered their defences.

What are the conditions needed for the Shakturi to reveal themselves? Because, well, there were about 8 planets in the galaxy the buggers could possibly take without going to war with me (would have squashed the roaches easily even with my initial navy) or the Ancient Guardians, and they'd taken one already (I took it shortly after lolpwning their homeworld with battleship-sized transports). I suppose the conditions are something like 10% or 20% of the galaxy?

Now that I'm starting another game (400 stars, 6x6 irregular, bigger than my first 100 4x4 irregular), I REALLY wish we had rally points for starports, because figuring out which of the Corvettes (lower tech pattern of course) around my homeworld are patrolling and which aren't, and then SELECTING the idle just-produced ones separately into 5-ship patrol groups, is a real pain in the ass.

Meanwhile my first capital ship, a 1950-size resupply ship (up to my size limit at present) is lumbering at Mk 1 Equinox speed and something like only 15 sublight cruise speed (can't go on DW right now to check)--haven't found the Sluken yet so I can't steal StarBurners from them yet, ugh--to the nearest pirate base to wipe it out while I assault all their bases on my planets at once with 10 unupgraded infantry... should I upgrade my infantry tactics first or recruit more? What happens if I start a war on the pirate faction while their facilities are still on my worlds? Easy sabotage?

Now that I'm starting another game (400 stars, 6x6 irregular, bigger than my first 100 4x4 irregular), I REALLY wish we had rally points for starports, because figuring out which of the Corvettes (lower tech pattern of course) around my homeworld are patrolling and which aren't, and then SELECTING the idle just-produced ones separately into 5-ship patrol groups, is a real pain in the ass.

I find it easiest to put the ships list on default sort order (click the blank column header on the far left and then flip the filter to something else and back if you've changed the sort order), scroll to the bottom of the list, and put the ships into fleets while they're still building.

Also, the patrol order is more or less just a way to waste fuel. Any military ships in a system are willing to respond to an attack that occurs within that system, whether they're on patrol or not, unless you've played with their aggressiveness setting (which resets itself to the default setting in one of the options menus every time the ship gets a new order anyways). All that the patrol order does is make the ships cruise around colonies, mining bases, research stations, resort bases, and any other stations in the system and jump around a bit, and the fleet tends to disperse in order to do this. Idle ships tend to be much more concentrated, and jumping across a system really doesn't take all that much time unless you're using Warp Bubble Generators - the system diameter is 50k range units, and even an unupgraded fully-powered Gerax Hyperdrive will let a ship cross that in 4 seconds plus jump initiation time. Plus, most systems don't have anything which is normally separated by anything close to the system diameter in the first place.

Also, as far as rally points go, while it's not quite a rally point, if you create a fleet out of incomplete ships and set a home base for that fleet, the ships of that fleet will move to their home base when completed and idle. This behavior also works for completed ships; toss them into a fleet and set the home base to somewhere you want the fleet to go, and the ships will make their way to the home base as they become idle. Ships in a fleet also like to regroup on the fleet leader if they become separated, so that's another way to get a kind of rally point if you don't want to set a home base for some reason. Home bases can be set to colonies from the fleets menu, or to colonies or stations if you use the 'set home base' button at the bottom of the panel in the lower left corner of the screen with a fleet selected.

should I upgrade my infantry tactics first or recruit more?

The techs increasing infantry attack or defense strength only apply to units recruited after the tech has been researched (same is true for the equivalent techs for other unit types). If you intend to make use of non-clone infantry, then it is better to get the techs before recruiting the infantry if you'll have the tech completed shortly or do not really need the troops soon. If you intend to make use of clone infantry, then I'd suggest forgetting that the infantry attack and defense bonus techs exist and instead concentrate on building up the experience of a core group of infantry units, as clone infantry starts at the same strength as your most experienced extant infantry unit, and while the infantry techs might still help (not sure, I've never checked, though I think someone said that the Fortress of Torak helps), it's not really required and it frees you to spend your weapons research on other things in that tree (cloning comes from the medical line in the High Tech tree, which additionally helps generate money because happier colonies grow faster and can be taxed more).

What happens if I start a war on the pirate faction while their facilities are still on my worlds? Easy sabotage?

Pirate facilities only feed money to the pirate factions and drain it from the planets that they're built upon (well, they also prevent pirate influence from dropping below a certain level at the planet, but that's not really of that much concern to a standard empire). As far as I am aware, there are no bonuses for any agent missions available to the pirates for having facilities on the planets of your empire, nor will you suffer any attacks due to the presence of said facilities.

Also, you cannot 'start' a war against a pirate faction; war is effectively the default state of relations unless you're paying them off, as your ships will regard pirate ships and bases as hostile and pirate ships will regard your ships, bases, and colonies as hostile potential targets except when a protection arrangement between your empire and their faction is in effect.

Thanks for the tips about patrolling being completely useless. I've left them all to idle intead. The problem is in the 17 seconds such a jump takes the pirates can kill one of my gas or mineral mines since I didn't equip them with quite enough protection yet (I have researched assault missiles but am still stuck with corvid shields and no armour)

On the other hand my first dreadnought is doing exactly as well as can be expected of almost 1600 effective payload in the early game.

You know how ivilian ships can only pack one weapon? Well, I'm slapping an assault missile (to later be replaced by a plasma thunderbolt once I get that tech to max level/990 range) on each and am wondering whether or not I should hypothetically put one Death Ray per freighter instead along with 10 or so Meridian Shields in the late game if I haven't quite exterminated the pirates by then. "So I heard u liek boarding actions..."

You know how ivilian ships can only pack one weapon? Well, I'm slapping an assault missile (to later be replaced by a plasma thunderbolt once I get that tech to max level/990 range) on each and am wondering whether or not I should hypothetically put one Death Ray per freighter instead along with 10 or so Meridian Shields in the late game if I haven't quite exterminated the pirates by then.

You can if you want to, but I personally wouldn't bother; Death Rays look more frightening than they actually are. It'll almost certainly cause most pirate ships to stand off rather than close, however. Death Rays will also make civilian freighters considerably larger than they have any real need to be, which increases their fuel consumption (due to increased number of sublight drive components to achieve the same speed, and due to the extra hab and life support components you probably needed to install to cover the Death Ray and an extra reactor to increase the energy storage enough to actually be able to use the weapon).

If I design my civilian freighters, I don't bother putting any weapons on them in the first place; a token armament consisting of a single weapon isn't usually going to save the civilian ship if a real warship engages it anyways. The best chance a freighter has against any kind of warship is having a high cruise speed and having enough shields to buy enough time for the hyperdrive to kick in.

The problem is in the 17 seconds such a jump takes the pirates can kill one of my gas or mineral mines since I didn't equip them with quite enough protection yet (I have researched assault missiles but am still stuck with corvid shields and no armour)

If you're developing assault missiles before standard armor, I don't think that your research priorities are quite right. Range is useful, but it only really becomes incredible in the later stages of the game when you can prevent the engagements from beginning at fairly close range and additionally have a much larger absolute range advantage to play with (absolute range advantage matters a bit more than relative range advantage because ship speed grows a little more slowly than weapon range and ship firepower density as the game progresses, and moreover relative ship speeds tend not to change as much and may even become closer as the game progresses, meaning that a ship attempting to close with another ship that is attempting to keep the range open will take longer to close the range and will take relatively heavier fire while closing later in the game than would have been the case earlier in the game).

Noted... Yeah I really don't like retrofitting too many times, which is why at lower difficulties I race up to a certain "base tech" (as in one that has improvements, but I do not research improvements for it) and stay there for quite a while. Assault Missiles are my favourite due to no loss over range and not having to branch and research quite as many different things as Plasma Thunderbolts.

Another example is how I'll be stuck on Equinox Mk 1 for a long time while researching other things.

I thought the civilian sector paid freighter maintenance? I was trying to milk money from them by making slightly costlier-than-necessary freighters which usually pack at least 5 shields and one weapon.

I will reconsider my instinct of trying to demand 50/22 speed/turn from my battleships and dreadnoughts then (sadly without Starburners I can only muster 14 sublight speed from my current 1950-size Dreadnought design using the basic Proton Thrusters) given your advice regarding tactics, because given plasma thunderbolt spam and a few assault missiles they are built to kite the tar out of anything remotely able to hit back enough to even put a dent in the shields and simply run down (with the aid of hyperdeny) anything that can run away save perhaps escorts and frigates. Packing on a dozen more fighter bays would be a more effective use of that space I suppose...

I thought the civilian sector paid freighter maintenance? I was trying to milk money from them by making slightly costlier-than-necessary freighters which usually pack at least 5 shields and one weapon.

The private sector does pay freighter maintenance, as well as the purchase cost (same is true for mining ships and mining stations). It's not really worth bothering about, however. Fuel consumption is more concerning, at least unless your state and private sector ships are operating on different fuels, as there's only a finite amount of fuel available at any given time and if your state and private sector use the same fuel, then all of your ships are drinking from the same well and if that well starts to run dry it can really screw you up for a while. Bigger freighters tend to consume more fuel per time period than smaller freighters (and the same is true of warships and sometimes stations), and you really don't need any private sector ship to be bigger than maybe size-300 at the outside to adequately fulfill its role.

Also, if you really want to milk money from the private sector, there are better ways to go about it than making freighters marginally more expensive. Which puts more money into the treasury, a freighter that costs 10% more when initially purchased, or a freighter that needs to be replaced most of the time a pirate attacks it? So long as you're not losing so many freighters that you start having resource problems, having to replace a few freighters every now and then keeps the resource transactions flowing and makes the private sector shell out a few thousand credits. There's also more exploitive tricks for funding your empire out of the private sector's pocketbook.

Well I STRONGLY dislike any disruptions to the supply chain so replacing freighters often is out of the question.

Guess it'll be massive freighters with lots of cargo bays, lots of shields and armor, and one long-range weapon with fleeing only at armour 50% or shields 20% (e.g. keep delivering goods, don't be scared, poke back at the enemy until you clear the delivery area and/or the starport/resource base kills him for you) from here on out.

That new game with the Pirates on for the first time is set at 240K base research cost (Expensive setting IIRC, as Normal was 120K). In it I FINALLY figured out where to upgrade a whole fleet at once (fleet interface hurrah). Unfortunately I found my corvettes being sent to a planet and based there wouldn't stay in orbit around the planet (i.e. move with the planetary motion) so I had to put them on patrols again. Yes, this ticks away at fuel, but

Tried 30K (Very Cheap) today just to see what it was like. My first colony ship didn't even finish before I had to queue up refitting it to pack a Gerax hyperdrive... and then Epsilon drive finished before that retrofit in the queue even got started, holy shit this is too fast.
*imagines setting research cost to 1K and having every other tech in the game done before being able to research hyperdrives...*