Archaeotechs and their quality (collaborative, contains arguable spoilers) (2024)

Notably, this weapon does have the 30 tracking of a T3 energy PD, not the 10 or 20 of T1 or T2 respectively.

With the AP, this weapon deals 66% more damage than the T3 PD. With the Rubricator as well, it deals 91% more.

Without the AP, it isn't as big an upgrade over Guardian PD as Nanite Flak is over T3 flak - only 25% more damage rather than 41.67% more damage - and also doesn't come with the corresponding +10 tracking. However, Nanite Flak can't be obtained reliably, and also consumes additional power. Besides, T3.6 or so is a fine place for a weapon to be, when before that the best you could ever research was T3. That's especially true when you can potentially pick this significantly before you get T3 PD (which is a tier 4 tech), at which point it's a major upgrade... and that's before you bring the AP into things. With the AP, this becomes an immense upgrade to your navy's anti-missile capability, and even without, usually outperforms T3 plasma at close-range anti-armor or anti-hull (including a bit of armor penetration).

As usual, the main reason NOT to put this on all your P slots - aside from potentially wanting some for flak - is the cost in MAs. However, while 12 MAs is among the highest for the slot size - the equivalent of an L rather than the S that P slots usually trade against - it's potentially affordable given how rare P slots are, and how huge the upside (if you took the AP) is, with no downside besides cost. It's a shame that starbases and civilian ships never have inherent P slots...

Cost 88 Alloys (same as T3) 10 MAs, takes 59 power (same as T3), tracking 100 (same as T3), hull HP 10 (same as T2), shield HP 25 (same as T3), evasion 80 (same as T2), speed 700 (same as T3), avg damage per day 34.78 (T2.4).

With the AP, damage per day of 46.22, will in excess of any normal strike craft. With the AP and the Rubricator, 51.47.

Like normal strike craft, can attack other strike craft but not missiles. Unlike normal strike craft, does not unlock Hangar Bay starbase modules when researched (might be a bug).

The fact that most strike craft (themselves included!) mount shields makes them utterly terrible against normal strike craft in any fight where shields are operable; in such a scenario, it would be best if the Ancient Driller Drones ignored enemy strike craft entirely and just went for the enemy hulls, but alas, this is not controllable. However, in systems where shields don't work, they are competent dogfighters (beating everything short of T3 even without the AP, and beating T3 with it). They are the best strike craft for use against Swarm Strikers (except other Swarm Strikers), though not dramatically better than T3 unless you have the AP.

Offensively against normal empires, they're harder to use effectively unless you have a lot of long-range anti-shield. Artillery works well for this, but it's hard to build a ship combining significant artillery and hangar slots, so in practice you'll need a mixed fleet of artillery ships to strip shields and carriers to bypass the remaining armor. H slots are rare enough that it might be viable to spend 10 MAs on each.

M: 425 armor & 190 (380 with AP) shield HP, 2.1 shield regen, takes 50 power, cost 44 Alloys 10 MAs

L: 1020 armor & 450 (900 with AP) shield HP, 5.1 shield regen, takes 100 power, cost 88 Alloys 12 MAs

This component only provides as much armor as T3 normal armor, but also throws in as much shield as T1 shielding (or T3.65 with AP). The regen is the same as T3 shields, as is the power demand. The combined HP is about as much as T4.37 armor (or T5.375 armor, with AP). The alloy cost is the same as T5 armor.

Unfortunately, it still suffers from the problem of being far too expensive in MAs to use on anything short of flagship vessels. A full set of these on a early game fleet of 20 corvettes would cost 480 MAs, an extreme amount at that point in the game even though it would grant them incredible defenses. It also lacks specialization; the armor amount means less regen (assuming you have percent-based armor regen) than if you went with pure armor of T4 or better, and the shield regen isn't high enouth to make the difference mid-fight (it almost never is).

As with AT shields, the biggest perk of this tech is that your starbases (and civilian ships) will be much more durable than normal until you reach near the top of the tech tree.

With the AP, provides +40% job output to those resources, instead of +25% each.

The main limitation on the usefulness of the refinery is that, if you have a high ratio of available building slots to pops, you just don't actually need the produced resources that much (and can mostly get what you do need from space mining and some planetary deposits). These resources become vital into the later game if you're needing to upgrade a lot of buildings and achieve density, so some empire types like hives or high-growth machine ascended or so on will benefit hugely from it. So will any empire in a game where the growth cost scaling is reduced or removed, as those will be swimming in pops. Similarly, if you play on low planet counts and/or somehow have Ancient Relics but don't have Utopia, you'll need the per-building-slot efficiency that this both provides and enables.

Uncommonly, the AP barely even changes the calculus. While the benefit is significant, even with the AP you don't build these everywhere, and even without the AP you do build them everywhere that produces significant amounts of the relevant resources. There's not a lot of gap between.

Still has 100% shield penetration, but adds 100% armor penetration (effectively becoming explosive disruptors). Also adds +25% damage vs. hull, which (except against targets with shield or armor hardening) effectively becomes +25% damage that won't be shown in the standard stat block.

S: costs 17 Alloys (same as T3) 10 MAs, takes 10 power (same as T3). Fires 10x as often (0.85 vs. 8.5 days) with the exact same missile characteristics as T3 missiles (5 armor 5 hull HP, 20 evasion, 18 speed), but deals slightly more than 1/10 as much damage (4.7 average/day rather than 4.11 for T3).

Factor in the +25% against hull, and effective damage per day becomes 5.875, which is higher than T4 (5.41) even if we assume the target has no armor. Adding the AP bonus, you either get 7.81 (better than T5's 7.11 even without armor) or 7.42 (still better than T5) depending on how anti-hull bonus and AP bonus stack. With the Rubricator as well, you get 8.695 or 8.131.

So... it's a missile that will heavily suppress enemy PD without meaningful reduction in its own DPS (especially in the early game); that bypasses both shield and armor, and deals stupendous damage (for its size) compared to any other missile or any other S penetrating weapon. Sure, it could use more tracking, and more range wouldn't hurt (it's awkward how swarmers now out-range normal missiles), but pile them on a picket-computer corvette or maybe an artillery-computer destroyer, and watch your enemies fall before you...

Oh, wait, you say you can't afford 30 MAs per corvette? You say that would be outrageously expensive, especially on such light hulls that you would lose some ships in every real battle even if they won decisively? Oh well... it was a fun dream. There's also the problem where nothing else that has even medium-range penetrating weapons can mount many S slots. Corvettes with artillery computers could maybe make this work, relying on their evasion to protect them against anything that has the range to shoot back (mostly kinetic artillery) and their speed to keep the range open, but corvettes can't use any computer that understands the concept "keep the range open". Destroyers typically lack the speed and evasion, and nothing bigger has many S slots at all.

With all that said, these are practically godlike on Menacing Corvettes, especially if you took the Archeo-Engineering AP.

M: +315 shield HP (505 with AP), 4.6 shield regen, 15% shield hardening. Takes 90 power, cost 22 Alloy 10 MAs

L: +750 shield HP (1200 with AP), 11.1 shield regen, 15% shield hardening. Takes 180 power, cost 44 Alloy 12 MAs

In total shield amount, matches T3 normal shields without the AP, or falls between T4 and T5 (about T4.64) with it. The power need and alloy costs are the same as T5. The regen is the same as T6 (Dark Matter Deflectors). The hardening is unique; no other non-A-slot component gives any. Unlike T4/T5 shields, they don't require Exotic Gases.

Besides, the unmodded AI doesn't use much in the way of penetrating weapons anyhow, and never uses them exclusively the way a competent player will. There might be a niche for these against human players though, who do focus on them (usually to the detriment of actually dealing shield damage, as it's normally easier to just bypass it).

Your starbases will equip these, which - if you research it early enough - makes them terrifyingly durable for the tech level (and immune to missile and strike craft shield bypass). With a lot of slots, that regen stacks quite well too. However, sometimes your starbases will run out of energy to equip weapons and leave slots empty! They also still don't know to skip these in pulsar/storm systems.

Cost 229 Alloys (same as T2) 45 MAs (instead of 3.38 VMs), takes 200 power (same as T1), expected damage per day 115.78 (~same as T2 115.46).

With AP, expected damage per day 153.99, with AP and Rubricator, expected damage per day 171.35.

45 MAs per battleship does add up a bit, but it's not outrageous; you don't need nearly as many battleships compared to smaller units, and they have a decent chance of surviving a fight.

The main thing is to make really sure you've got some way to deal with the armor that this weapon can't handle. Possibly a mixed fleet of Ancient Saturator Artillery and lances...

The ascension perk increases the damage by 33%, and the Rubricator by another 15%, for a total of 650.68 average damage/day before other modifiers.

On the other hand, the range penalty is quite bad; you're not only giving up the alpha strike to any enemy titans, your titan can't even fire until it's well within the range of the enemy X-slot weapons. Alpha strike is often decisive in Stellaris fleet actions, and giving it up hurts. Additionally, weapon range is the most common determinant of engagement range, and it can be very useful to combat-lock a fleeing enemy from across the system.

However, there's a (stupid) hidden benefit to the shortened range. The way the Artillery computer works, titans normally will never willingly allow an enemy ship within the range of their L slots, because the longest-range L slot has less than half the range of a Perdition Beam. However, the Ancient Ruination Glare has the same range as a Kinetic Artillery, so your titan will cheerfully go as close as it needs to fire those (and no closer) and will actually use all its weapons. Of course, that means it'll be in artillery range of the enemy artillery (and swarmer missiles and neutron launchers) too, while normally it can largely ignore such things.

Note that this is not a percentage increase; it will push a T1 corvette from 60 evasion to 65, or a T1 titan from 5 evasion to 10.

Unfortunately, as a positive aura, it only applies to titan's own fleet, and you realistically can only have one titan in a fleet, so there's a big opportunity cost to taking it. You might use it if you're aiming to push destroyers to the evasion cap, or building frigates for use against artillery ships, but in most cases giving your own fleet a massive armor and hull regen, or +10 tracking, will be more useful.

At least you don't have to worry too much about the cost. 45 MAs is considerable, but you can't get a lot of titans and it's not an unreasonable amount to spend on one.

Cost 50 Alloys (same) 45 MAs, upkeep 1 Energy (same), build time 180 (same).

Provides no slots/hardpoints, but provides the following modifiers: +15% starbase hull HP (instead of +10%), +15% starbase armor HP (instead of +10%), no trade protection or protection range, +2 defense platform cap (instead of +1), +5% defense platform damage (no equivalent, not shown in tooltip), +5% defense platform hull HP (no equivalent, not shown in tooltip).

With the AP, adds another +5% starbase armor HP (total +20%) and 10% starbase armor hardening.

However, the critical weakness of DPs is their fragility. They have about as much total HP as a cruiser (though more of it is in hull, so with lower tech they will somewhat exceed a cruiser's HP, and the bonus to DP hull from this module will help more), but they have no evasion and can't retreat. As such, even a victorious battle will usually see you needing to replace a bunch of them. As long as the platforms aren't themselves too expensive (e.g. because they use AT components) replacing them is merely a hassle and a distraction rather than a major hardship, but it does make a module that emphasizes building lots of them less appealing. For long fights, DPs are also less attractive simply because they're almost always wiped out long before the starbase is, glass cannons that allow a huge amount if initial firepower but don't last.

As far as I can tell it costs no MAs at all, the only AT component not to.

In practice... colossus weapons are so rarely worth using, and this is no exception. It doesn't even wipe the colony if you don't have the AP and the enemy has machines or robots/droids/synths, though against any except machine empires it can make a planet far easier to invade by killing the defensive armies.

When the only reason to have a colossus is generally "so I can Total War", there are probably better weapons to put on it, and this isn't much worth the research time. I'll admit it's funny, though. Return to monke!

Provides the following bonuses: +33% starbase shield HP, +33% starbase shield hardening, +25% DP shield HP, +25% DP shield hardening, +0.1% DP shield regen (not shown in tooltip).

With AP, provides +50% each starbase shield HP and hardening (instead of +33% each).

However, starbase shields are far weaker than their other defensive layers, even when not built in storm or pulsar system. This module, even with the AP, doesn't come close to changing that. As such, the benefit is arguably more for the DPs, especially if combined with Ancient Ramparts (which boost DP hull but not armor, suggesting a shield-heavy defense).

Unfortunately, you usually want to build bastions in systems that disable shields, because it's a huge defensive advantage to know that neither side will have shields when you're fighting against enemies who not only likely brought shield generators but also shield-damaging or shield-bypassing weapons. As such, the only time this building makes any sense is at a choke point that is not in a storm or pulsar system, and when you don't have Zroni Storm Casters. Even then, it's questionable; bastions (especially bastions in shield-allowed systems) have many buildings they'd like to build, and one which consumes such a rare resource and has such high upkeep will not be popular. I could maybe see it getting used if the enemy packs a lot of shield-bypassing weapons, the AI thinks you should use tons of shields anyhow, and the AI did not load you down with a ton of Ancient Suspension Fields (which mean you don't need extra hardening anyhow).

The extra shield regen, assuming I'm reading the data file correctly, is very low; a DP would typically see only about 2 points per day of extra regen.

S: takes 15 power (T4 laser takes 13), costs 17 Alloy (same as T4) 8 MAs (instead of 0.25 RCs).

M: takes 30 power (same as T4), costs 34 Alloys (same as T4) 10 MAs (instead of 0.5 RCs). Underperforms other sizes slightly when compared on damage to standard lasers.

L: takes 60 power (T4 takes 67), costs 68 Alloys (same as T4) 12 MAs (instead of 1 RC).

Damage is around T3.5 compared to standard lasers, without AP bonuses. With the AP, it's more like T4.6. With the Rubricator as well, it's right around T5, give or take a tiny bit. Not sure why M is notably worse on damage than the other sizes (e.g. L is actually cheaper than a T4 laser but outperforms a T5 with all bonuses; M costs the same as T4 but underperforms a T5 with the same bonuses).

However, this weapon runs into two problems. One is simple and familiar: lasers kind of suck. They don't have the range for sniping, the tracking for anti-small, or the damage for brawling. The Ancient Cavitation Collapser changes none of that. The other is the standard problem of every AT component that seeks to replace a standard component: the unbearable MA cost. Even if your enemy was running around with no shield and 5x as much armor as hull - an ideal place for these weapons - you wouldn't be able to outfit a very large fleet with them because the costs are just so high.

With that said, they're probably worth researching early, especially if you have the AP. They handily outperform T3 lasers on the defense (ships, especially early ships, often have at least as much armor as hull) and your starbases' internal batteries don't have to pay the MA cost.

Even with the 33% damage bonus from the AP, the weapon only very slightly outclasses the damage of T3 railguns. With the extra 15% from the rubricator, it reaches roughly T3.5.

To start with, its base numbers are obviously unimpressive. Lots of AT components are T3 as a baseline, plus something to make them more like T4/T5 that gets more impressive when you add the AP. This component is T3 as a baseline, minus something that takes it down to T2 but gets added back if you take the AP.

It's boring. The only unusual properties it has, other than costing far too much of the precious MAs, is being the lone medium-range L kinetic weapon with no minimum range... and having by far the worst base accuracy in the game. The minimum range thing might even be worth something, except that the L weapon variant can't hit the broad side of an even minimally-evasive barn (or frigate).

That base accuracy flaw deserves some extra attention. Miss chance from inaccuracy is additive, not multiplicative, with miss chance from evasion, and it can easily go all the way to 100%. If you fire the L version of this weapon (5 tracking, assuming no bonuses) at a target with less than 5 evasion, it'll hit 50% of the time (this is what the average damage numbers are based on, the ones that get all the way to roughly T3.5 if you stack on every AT bonus). If you fire at a target with 45 evasion (like a mildly dodgy frigate), you'll hit only 10% of the time, a decrease in effective damage output of 80% relative to expectations. If you fire at a target with 55 evasion or more - reachable by a destroyer - you will miss literally every shot.

In theory, low accuracy high damage weapons represent the potential to become powerhouses if you can boost their accuracy enough. Take two weapons - say, a disruptor with 100% accuracy and a plasma cannon with 80% accuracy - and imagine that they both do the same amount of expected damage. Now combine both with a sentient line computer (+20 to hit). Assuming evasion isn't an issue, the plasma cannon now deals 25% more DPS than it used to, or than the disruptor still does. Pretty sweet, eh? Except there's no realistic way to stack +50 to hit, or anything close, to unlock this weapon's supposedly latent +100% expected DPS. With the right ship fit you can get to +35, and that's about it. This weapon will only benefit from that a little more than a normal railgun... and by the time you have the tech needed to get that bonus, you'll have higher-tier railguns anyhow. Meanwhile, in the window of time when you might use the weapon, evasion is king and you will probably get worse performance than out of a T2 coilgun. All that for an obscene amount of MAs per ship...