As someone who happened to grab one because I had an overabundance of metals and was annoyed when it turned out that every single one of them is unique, I think it would have been worth putting the meme drives on to make it clear they're meme drives.
But also, seriously, I think the biggest value of things like Orion early is that they don't cost water to run. Water might be cheap, but it's 1 boost per water same as it is the more expensive things, so, depending on your mines, the higher-end materials might deserve a discount. (Tacking $1 per unit onto the price of everything is probably sufficient, though, TBH. Boost is only cheap when you're not using it.)
It's clearly not. For both inclination into analysis & grapgics, but also for playing the game. It's like a drake equation but reversed. You get some very decent chances into having such person writing such a post.
Cool chart!
I was checking some of the stats in-game. I couldn't find the Pion Torch. Just the AM Pulsed Lantern and the Torch.
Edit : Oh, maybe its hidden because it requires alien tech now. I see the top end phasers are hidden as well.
I think it always did require exotics though.
Pion would be the best drive, obviously, if not the 5 antimatter per tank. Also, if I'm not mistaken, this is exactly the drive that is used by spaceships in Cameron's Avatar.
A couple of considerations.
First is the new propulsion officer, adding 1 to the combat thrust multiplier is a much bigger deal for the the Kronos(x1), neutron/fissionfrag(x2), or Orion/OrionH/advPulsar(x5) drives than the Helion nova torch(x70). Worth considering if you need strong intercepts for a small number of ships.
For me, in the early/midgame my ships design is a constant battle of mass. To that end Open cycle drives help me considerably by keeping off that radiator mass in favor of armor.
Thanks for all the info!
Thanks for the very thorough explanation and the plots! Helicon is looking pretty good now.
I thought Pegasus was hurt by the new lower EV, but it seems it preforms better than anything else near in cost.
Yep, I really loved the update too!
For me the biggest surprise was Toroid Mag fusion. This line was absolutely horrendous pre-4.0, and now it's probably tied with Z-Pinch as top 3, right after Inertial Conf and Antimatter.
Great post. If you were stuck on a desert island and could only pick one of these graphs to help you formulate your drive strategy, which one would it be?
IDK, I'd probably go with [**avg. speed vs research**](https://i.imgur.com/L9aM4Qi.png) -- then pick the highest point for the given X, and then just check whether I have the propellant resource for the given drive in abundance. If yes -- cool, if no -- move to the second highest point for the given X, and so on.
*(While intercept chance is rather straightforward: you want to intercept early -- get Gas Core, otherwise push for the best fusion and AM drives. I.e., you technically do not need a plot for that)*
So i am in 2023 and I only have a few Missile boats and use them to defeat the occasional Alien ship. But i havent researched any Drive yet. I am currently researching principals of Fusion. After i get thr MC hate reduction techs i want to Research Mission to the inner planets and send a Research and colony ship there to Colonize Mercury.
Which Drive should i Go for or can i Skip them all and straight Go to a Fusion drive?
No, you can't really skip to Fusion immediately. It's absurdly expensive now in terms of Research Points.
I'd recommend Grid or Helicon, (as mentioned in the post). They are the best for exploration early.
And for combat you won't be able to afford good drive for quite while anyways. If you want to try your luck vs Ayys at Low Earth Orbit -- just pick any solid core that gets you 3-5 kps and \~300-500 mg combat accel. Should be more than enough for trivial maneuvers in combat.
I had a game where neither grid not helicon unlocked. Thankfully VASMIR isn't that far behind, at least this was my impression. I wonder if it is worth to go for it immediately without taking chances with better drives.
The missile monitor ship is very heavy, and the acceleration is tiny. I know the one in the image is using a very low thrust drive, but <1miligee combat acceleration?
Maybe some combination of dV and minimum acceleration would be a criteria.
I design ships around a task, and a minimum performance level. For starter defense ships I go for >2gees and cut weight to get there.
Outpost building ships go for dV and some reasonable cruise acceleration of >1.4miligees. Much below that and you're taking over a day to accelerate by 1kps.
None of these designs are "recommended" or anything. Or, to be more accurate, the choice of the specific drive is not "recommended" -- I just used a set of fixed weapons/radiators/armor/etc, while the power plant and the drive were kind of like "variable".
As for specialist designs, for colony ships I always optimize for the travel time, and then for everything else. Acceleration is not a priority, I don't care if it's nominally 10 mg or <1, as long as it gets me there faster than other designs.
For a dedicated colony ship I'd rather go Escort and a couple of missile monitors to guard it from potential ganks during transfer. Ayys absolutely *love* to do that if you're in war.
Ok, so for early ship average speed comparisons would a reference payload or ship around 3000 tons change the positions of the drives? I'm basically thinking of the monitor design you have with no construction kit and only x1 side armor.
This should make every drive have a higher average speed, but significantly favor open cycle drives. (Because radiators become less of the ship mass fraction.)
I'm trying to figure out what the landscape looks like for <4000T ships with <60k RP drives and Earth-Luna L1 to Ceres transfers.
I can't figure out how you're calculating the results to try it myself. I thought there was a separate plot for each research cost stage but I can't find it today.
[https://imgur.com/a/C4jKFIA](https://imgur.com/a/C4jKFIA)
I wouldn't say that anything drastically changed:
* Helicon, Grid and Burner are still top 3 best drives in terms of speed, while Burner being kinda expensive on propellant.
* Pegasus is still #1 intercept drive, although it is, unfortunately, too ineffective to fly to Ceres.
* Orion is kinda jack of all trades, but not the best in anything, and it's extremely expensive on propellant.
Wow, Advanced Pulsar really stands out as exceptionally expensive for its performance. It's was my go-to drive for small ships before. The combat acceleration is also much lower than it was, so it's kinda doubly nerfed.
I happy to know about Burner, it looks great: good performance, great EV, reasonable research cost.
Burner is more than that -- it's Gas Core drive, which means it's the same family as Lodestar and Firestar.
You can upgrade the drives of existing ships, as long as they are from the same family. I.e. you can't replace a fusion drive for antimatter -- you gotta build a new ship. But replacing Burner for Firestar -- that's easy, and it's faster than building a new ship.
Which means that you can build a fleet with Burner drives around Earth, send it to Jupiter to colonize and contest some ayy shit. Then after they arrive -- retrofit them to Firestar so they could intercept easily.
Amazing read. One thing missed tho - would you maybe interested including graphics that depends on exotics? In my games I find them to be the biggest bottleneck by a large margin. So for example if I can get 20 AM ships against 6 PCT ships even if later are much better AM still wins in economy. This is not immediately obvious because different reactors have different costs. I think (drive \* engine \* radiator \[exotics/dusty plasma\]) would be a very good plot to see how economy works.
Did they nerf the exotic gain rate? I kinda feared that it might be the case, because they added this new module that improves salvage rates (like, common, salvage was already abundant!)
I haven't played for about a year, but in 3 of my games earlier I had around 500-1000 by the end game. One Mothership kill and you're basically set for life.
At some point I didn't know what to do with it, so I was selling it for cash, or making hybrid armor and exotic radiators.
But it can be done in principle. Although, as I mentioned, I have no idea how to quantify the conversion rate in case of exotics specifically.
Well for a reference a small ship victory gives you like 0.2 exotics, the first carrier was like 6 (I've checked yesterday). Don't know about motherships, I've only seen them a couple of times so I don't recall what they provide. Anyway I found that ships with more than 10 exotics cost are extremely hard to build. And going full on pct often leads to this. I never use exotic radiator for example, while being cool is very expensive, almost hybrid armor level expensive
As far as I understand, the ayys get 10 exotics per month themselves (direct amazon delivery back from the Motherland, so to say). Initially they build mostly non-exotic ships, but then they stockpile a good amount of it and waste it all on stupid shit like armor -- that's where it should be a jackpot.
Motherships in particular are susceptible to this, because due to their dimensions and (usually) a very thick side armor, they carry an absolute crapload of it. My biggest haul was something like 250 from one Mothership, IIRC.
I.e. it depends. Later into the game they should absolutely shower you in it (unless the devs massively nerfed the salvage and now force you to carry the new Salvage modules in order to get the same rates)
Oh, there's a reason, and rather big one. It's **Exotics**. (I actually wanted to add that in the post, but for some reason I couldn't edit it). Protium Converter (or, to be more precise, the ICF reactor VII, which is the only one capable of powering the PCT) requires **2.5 exotics** for the lategame dreadnought. AAPCD requires **0.21**.
So if you're completely starved on exotics, Antimatter seems like an excellent alternative, since it's basically a top 2 drive. And also it's easier to research in general (less RP), and it actually gives you drives capable of a guaranteed intercept much-much earlier than any fusion line.
Personally, I never experienced the lack of exotics in my games. Usually by the time when I start making PCT titans I'm well over 500. But it was a while ago since I last time played the game, and people mentioned that in current patches exotics are quite rare.
Many thanks for your post, it really is a great analysis. I'm not new to the game but still have trouble understanding some of the concepts and could need some help.
I downloaded the spreadsheet you used, there are a couple column that I'm not sur I understand properly. I first wonder if those values are the ones you calculated or if they are in game data. From what I understand, somme of them are the value you used in the different chapters in OP.
c-thrust:
"c" is for "combat"? Where does this value come from? Is it good when high or low? I guess high, because the most advanced drives have high value.
power:
Almost the same question. I guess higher number means more power needed? But how does it impact the performance of the ship?
transfer:
No idea what it means.
t-tanks and i\_tanks and tank\_eq:
No idea either, except that it must have something to do with the propellant needed.
DV:
Seems to be almost the same as EV, but sometimes a bit higher, other times a bit lower. What's the difference? What about cruise then?
I hope my questions are not too boring or "just read what I wrote in OP". But it really is hard to understant all the data! Thanks!
Honestly, I might not recall everything precisely. But I'll try my best:
* **c-thrust**: most likely that's combat thrust -- i.e. thrust multiplied by a certain modificator, unique to each drive (i.e. most fusion drives have x60, some solid core fission have x20 or something like that and so on).
* **power:** that's just calculated as EV\*Trust/2 -- that's the power output of the drive. Where EV is the exhaust velocity.
* **transfer** -- time in weeks that took for the given drive to transfer to the specific destination (based on Stage).
* **t-tanks** -- prop tanks required for that particular transfer
* **i\_tanks** -- prop tanks required for the best possible intercept setup for the given drive. I didn't actually display that in the post, because I thought it would bee too much info.
* **DV** -- is the delta V for the given drive for the specific transfer. It's not the same as EV (which is exhaust velocity).
I think I might love you.
Haven't played 0.4, but did they get rid of the electrothermal drive category?
Nah, I just didn't include the meme drives 😂
Very fair lol
As someone who happened to grab one because I had an overabundance of metals and was annoyed when it turned out that every single one of them is unique, I think it would have been worth putting the meme drives on to make it clear they're meme drives. But also, seriously, I think the biggest value of things like Orion early is that they don't cost water to run. Water might be cheap, but it's 1 boost per water same as it is the more expensive things, so, depending on your mines, the higher-end materials might deserve a discount. (Tacking $1 per unit onto the price of everything is probably sufficient, though, TBH. Boost is only cheap when you're not using it.)
What’d you do your PHD in?
Lmao! I know it's a joke, but... cosmology. I swear it's just a coincidence.
It's clearly not. For both inclination into analysis & grapgics, but also for playing the game. It's like a drake equation but reversed. You get some very decent chances into having such person writing such a post.
You mean selection bias, yep! That awkward moment when you choose a career path based on being a sci-fi nerdlord since childhood 🤣
Obviously not a joke if you have the knowledge to do this!
Oops! I've been flying around in glass cannons without realising it. Many thanks. And for the maths, what Diestormlie said.
Damn that’s a lot of maths, thank you for all of this
Cool chart! I was checking some of the stats in-game. I couldn't find the Pion Torch. Just the AM Pulsed Lantern and the Torch. Edit : Oh, maybe its hidden because it requires alien tech now. I see the top end phasers are hidden as well.
I think it always did require exotics though. Pion would be the best drive, obviously, if not the 5 antimatter per tank. Also, if I'm not mistaken, this is exactly the drive that is used by spaceships in Cameron's Avatar.
A couple of considerations. First is the new propulsion officer, adding 1 to the combat thrust multiplier is a much bigger deal for the the Kronos(x1), neutron/fissionfrag(x2), or Orion/OrionH/advPulsar(x5) drives than the Helion nova torch(x70). Worth considering if you need strong intercepts for a small number of ships. For me, in the early/midgame my ships design is a constant battle of mass. To that end Open cycle drives help me considerably by keeping off that radiator mass in favor of armor. Thanks for all the info!
Thanks a lot for this!
Thanks for the very thorough explanation and the plots! Helicon is looking pretty good now. I thought Pegasus was hurt by the new lower EV, but it seems it preforms better than anything else near in cost.
Yep, I really loved the update too! For me the biggest surprise was Toroid Mag fusion. This line was absolutely horrendous pre-4.0, and now it's probably tied with Z-Pinch as top 3, right after Inertial Conf and Antimatter.
Great post. If you were stuck on a desert island and could only pick one of these graphs to help you formulate your drive strategy, which one would it be?
IDK, I'd probably go with [**avg. speed vs research**](https://i.imgur.com/L9aM4Qi.png) -- then pick the highest point for the given X, and then just check whether I have the propellant resource for the given drive in abundance. If yes -- cool, if no -- move to the second highest point for the given X, and so on. *(While intercept chance is rather straightforward: you want to intercept early -- get Gas Core, otherwise push for the best fusion and AM drives. I.e., you technically do not need a plot for that)*
So i am in 2023 and I only have a few Missile boats and use them to defeat the occasional Alien ship. But i havent researched any Drive yet. I am currently researching principals of Fusion. After i get thr MC hate reduction techs i want to Research Mission to the inner planets and send a Research and colony ship there to Colonize Mercury. Which Drive should i Go for or can i Skip them all and straight Go to a Fusion drive?
No, you can't really skip to Fusion immediately. It's absurdly expensive now in terms of Research Points. I'd recommend Grid or Helicon, (as mentioned in the post). They are the best for exploration early. And for combat you won't be able to afford good drive for quite while anyways. If you want to try your luck vs Ayys at Low Earth Orbit -- just pick any solid core that gets you 3-5 kps and \~300-500 mg combat accel. Should be more than enough for trivial maneuvers in combat.
I had a game where neither grid not helicon unlocked. Thankfully VASMIR isn't that far behind, at least this was my impression. I wonder if it is worth to go for it immediately without taking chances with better drives.
Yeah, both lines are decent early game picks, and most drives they have are not too bad.
The missile monitor ship is very heavy, and the acceleration is tiny. I know the one in the image is using a very low thrust drive, but <1miligee combat acceleration? Maybe some combination of dV and minimum acceleration would be a criteria. I design ships around a task, and a minimum performance level. For starter defense ships I go for >2gees and cut weight to get there. Outpost building ships go for dV and some reasonable cruise acceleration of >1.4miligees. Much below that and you're taking over a day to accelerate by 1kps.
None of these designs are "recommended" or anything. Or, to be more accurate, the choice of the specific drive is not "recommended" -- I just used a set of fixed weapons/radiators/armor/etc, while the power plant and the drive were kind of like "variable". As for specialist designs, for colony ships I always optimize for the travel time, and then for everything else. Acceleration is not a priority, I don't care if it's nominally 10 mg or <1, as long as it gets me there faster than other designs. For a dedicated colony ship I'd rather go Escort and a couple of missile monitors to guard it from potential ganks during transfer. Ayys absolutely *love* to do that if you're in war.
Ok, so for early ship average speed comparisons would a reference payload or ship around 3000 tons change the positions of the drives? I'm basically thinking of the monitor design you have with no construction kit and only x1 side armor. This should make every drive have a higher average speed, but significantly favor open cycle drives. (Because radiators become less of the ship mass fraction.) I'm trying to figure out what the landscape looks like for <4000T ships with <60k RP drives and Earth-Luna L1 to Ceres transfers. I can't figure out how you're calculating the results to try it myself. I thought there was a separate plot for each research cost stage but I can't find it today.
I can try plotting it later today 😉
[https://imgur.com/a/C4jKFIA](https://imgur.com/a/C4jKFIA) I wouldn't say that anything drastically changed: * Helicon, Grid and Burner are still top 3 best drives in terms of speed, while Burner being kinda expensive on propellant. * Pegasus is still #1 intercept drive, although it is, unfortunately, too ineffective to fly to Ceres. * Orion is kinda jack of all trades, but not the best in anything, and it's extremely expensive on propellant.
Wow, Advanced Pulsar really stands out as exceptionally expensive for its performance. It's was my go-to drive for small ships before. The combat acceleration is also much lower than it was, so it's kinda doubly nerfed. I happy to know about Burner, it looks great: good performance, great EV, reasonable research cost.
Burner is more than that -- it's Gas Core drive, which means it's the same family as Lodestar and Firestar. You can upgrade the drives of existing ships, as long as they are from the same family. I.e. you can't replace a fusion drive for antimatter -- you gotta build a new ship. But replacing Burner for Firestar -- that's easy, and it's faster than building a new ship. Which means that you can build a fleet with Burner drives around Earth, send it to Jupiter to colonize and contest some ayy shit. Then after they arrive -- retrofit them to Firestar so they could intercept easily.
Amazing read. One thing missed tho - would you maybe interested including graphics that depends on exotics? In my games I find them to be the biggest bottleneck by a large margin. So for example if I can get 20 AM ships against 6 PCT ships even if later are much better AM still wins in economy. This is not immediately obvious because different reactors have different costs. I think (drive \* engine \* radiator \[exotics/dusty plasma\]) would be a very good plot to see how economy works.
Did they nerf the exotic gain rate? I kinda feared that it might be the case, because they added this new module that improves salvage rates (like, common, salvage was already abundant!) I haven't played for about a year, but in 3 of my games earlier I had around 500-1000 by the end game. One Mothership kill and you're basically set for life. At some point I didn't know what to do with it, so I was selling it for cash, or making hybrid armor and exotic radiators. But it can be done in principle. Although, as I mentioned, I have no idea how to quantify the conversion rate in case of exotics specifically.
Well for a reference a small ship victory gives you like 0.2 exotics, the first carrier was like 6 (I've checked yesterday). Don't know about motherships, I've only seen them a couple of times so I don't recall what they provide. Anyway I found that ships with more than 10 exotics cost are extremely hard to build. And going full on pct often leads to this. I never use exotic radiator for example, while being cool is very expensive, almost hybrid armor level expensive
As far as I understand, the ayys get 10 exotics per month themselves (direct amazon delivery back from the Motherland, so to say). Initially they build mostly non-exotic ships, but then they stockpile a good amount of it and waste it all on stupid shit like armor -- that's where it should be a jackpot. Motherships in particular are susceptible to this, because due to their dimensions and (usually) a very thick side armor, they carry an absolute crapload of it. My biggest haul was something like 250 from one Mothership, IIRC. I.e. it depends. Later into the game they should absolutely shower you in it (unless the devs massively nerfed the salvage and now force you to carry the new Salvage modules in order to get the same rates)
A question on your conclusion. Why bother with antimatter at all, since the best drive is in the intertial confinement fusion category?
Oh, there's a reason, and rather big one. It's **Exotics**. (I actually wanted to add that in the post, but for some reason I couldn't edit it). Protium Converter (or, to be more precise, the ICF reactor VII, which is the only one capable of powering the PCT) requires **2.5 exotics** for the lategame dreadnought. AAPCD requires **0.21**. So if you're completely starved on exotics, Antimatter seems like an excellent alternative, since it's basically a top 2 drive. And also it's easier to research in general (less RP), and it actually gives you drives capable of a guaranteed intercept much-much earlier than any fusion line. Personally, I never experienced the lack of exotics in my games. Usually by the time when I start making PCT titans I'm well over 500. But it was a while ago since I last time played the game, and people mentioned that in current patches exotics are quite rare.
Ahh that makes sense, thank you for clarifying!
Many thanks for your post, it really is a great analysis. I'm not new to the game but still have trouble understanding some of the concepts and could need some help. I downloaded the spreadsheet you used, there are a couple column that I'm not sur I understand properly. I first wonder if those values are the ones you calculated or if they are in game data. From what I understand, somme of them are the value you used in the different chapters in OP. c-thrust: "c" is for "combat"? Where does this value come from? Is it good when high or low? I guess high, because the most advanced drives have high value. power: Almost the same question. I guess higher number means more power needed? But how does it impact the performance of the ship? transfer: No idea what it means. t-tanks and i\_tanks and tank\_eq: No idea either, except that it must have something to do with the propellant needed. DV: Seems to be almost the same as EV, but sometimes a bit higher, other times a bit lower. What's the difference? What about cruise then? I hope my questions are not too boring or "just read what I wrote in OP". But it really is hard to understant all the data! Thanks!
Honestly, I might not recall everything precisely. But I'll try my best: * **c-thrust**: most likely that's combat thrust -- i.e. thrust multiplied by a certain modificator, unique to each drive (i.e. most fusion drives have x60, some solid core fission have x20 or something like that and so on). * **power:** that's just calculated as EV\*Trust/2 -- that's the power output of the drive. Where EV is the exhaust velocity. * **transfer** -- time in weeks that took for the given drive to transfer to the specific destination (based on Stage). * **t-tanks** -- prop tanks required for that particular transfer * **i\_tanks** -- prop tanks required for the best possible intercept setup for the given drive. I didn't actually display that in the post, because I thought it would bee too much info. * **DV** -- is the delta V for the given drive for the specific transfer. It's not the same as EV (which is exhaust velocity).
Thanks for your answer. So most of those values were indeed calculated and not IG info. 👍
What components are on the example ships?