Ship Subarchetypes

This guide explains designs and strategies that can be used in a variety of different ship archetypes. The main focus lies on competitive ships built for elimination.

Explosion gun

Functionality

Explosion gun in action. The enemy shields have not affect since the explosions happen inside the ship.

Nuke explosions attach to any ship they hit in order to prevent explosions from phasing into a fast moving ship, but as soon as a ship with an attached explosion dies completely the explosion will just stop moving at all.

Nukes in classic worked different to how they work now. Back then when the ship died the attached nukes would inherit all the momentum. This meant that one could accelerate a piece of armor into nukes to shoot an explosion without hitbox that phases through enemy ships destroying all their insides. The fix for this was nuke momentum abruptly stopping after the ship died.

Modern explosion guns just accelerate a small piece of structure that does not get destroyed in the explosion, but has multiple explosions attached. This has quite a few downsides over the old method and is more difficult to pull off.

Components

Components of an explosion gun

You need 4 things to make a modern explosion gun:

1. The explosive: An explosion source
2. The attacher: Something to detonate the explosion on.
3. The accelerant: Some part(s) that survives the initial explosion
4. The accelerator: Something to accelerate 3.

For 1 nukes are the obvious choice since they are the most destructive weapons. Factories and reactors also had brief experimentation, but those are unwieldy.

3x1 structure is best for 2. You want to use structure because parts leave structure after they get destroyed which cause explosions to attach to those debris. Using structure from the start circumvents this. You want 3x1 because that leaves the most space after getting destroyed. You want to space the explosions as much as possible to have more chances of hitting a vital component.

For 3 you want a very small part. Early ships used 1x1 structure pieces. Using something even small makes the gun even faster giving it greater range but has the funny issue that it sometimes just phases the structure all the way through the opponents ship without damaging it.

Tb are by far the best accelerator, but thrusters might work for different approaches which use rotational speed. In fact you could argue that reactor pikes are explosion guns as they fulfil all the requirements being laid out here. Exploding a reactor and quickly rotating into an enemy can cause explosions to happen inside the ship similar to what a explosion gun would do.

Testing/Using

An example of not all tiles being destroyed in the initial explosion. The ship here self destructed a few ticks after this screenshot

There is a mod used by players of the excelsior discord that removes the explosion graphics which makes seeing whats going on easier. It also removes the nuke cooldown which makes rapid tests at low game speeds more convenient. Using dev mode is also recommend because of the tick step feature.

1. Target your tb on the accelerant and the nukes on any attacher tile.
2. Go into tick step mode
3. Autofire the nukes
4. Step one tick

After that every tile of attacher must be destroyed. If one remains explosions will attach to it and wont get ejected with the accelerant. In practise this means that your ship will self destruct. You can leave tick step mode possibly at a low speed setting and watch the results.

Instant Hyperjump

Setup for instant hyperjump

This tech allows one to charge a hyperjump and then execute it immediately at a later time. The disadvantage is that the ship can not move while doing that as that would cancel the jump.

Setup

• Your ship needs 2 hyperdrives. One of them should not be accessible by crew
• Start the hyperjump.
• After charging you can turn the inaccessible hyperdrive of at any time to instantly jump

Nuke Range extender (NRE)

NRE in action (Ship by Nick)

NRE fail: The nukes fired before the rail could destroy the structure

Nukes theoretically have very high range, but the problem is that their launch only gets triggered if the target is in range. You might think that setting the nukes to autofire solves that problem, but their range will sadly be decreased.

To still get full range we can use an exploit called NRE. It works like this:

• Target your nukes and a rail gun at the same piece of structure
• All the nukes must have the structure piece in its firing arc (except if you use illegal nukes)
• Autofire the rail and nukes simultaneously

This works because the nuke thinks it will be able to lock on, but removing their target will force them to default to a straight path.

Be very careful when using NRE. Making a mistake likely results in blowing your own ship up.

This strategy is not competitively viable as NRE can easily be dodged if you anticipate them. Even if they hit the spread out damage often isn't even enough to go through all the shields.

Preload

Preload should at least be considered by any ship using launchers. It makes the ship more flexible but adds the need for additional micro.

• HE missile ships often add EMP preload as they struggle against shielded opponents.
• Mines are often a good preload option for nukers or the other way around

Pretask

Large shield pretask on an avoider

Pretasking is done by manipulation crew in order to supply something faster.

This is done by pathing crew through one high priority resource consumer in order to supply another lower priority consumer. If the high priority consumer requires resources the crew that already picked them up in order to supply the low priority target will change tasks.

Pretasking is mostly used to make large shields recharge faster after they are dealt damage.

• Assigning your reactor to any part breaks pretasking as crew will no longer change tasks for any reason.
• Having idle crew breaks pretask as they will take the new job instead of already walking crew being reassigned.

Side Nukes

An ion rammer with side nukes (Ship by Plaus)

Try to predict where the opponent is moving. (Green circle) Imagine a blue line that is tangent to that circle, the point where the line touches the circle is where you want to target. (Red dot) But keep in mind that you still have to think about whether you really want to launch. You should not launch in the provided picture because the nukes would miss by a mile

If you want to shoot nukes while circling another ship, you should target a bit above the middle of their side. They will either need to continue the spin and tank the nukes on the sides which is terrible or break off and tank with the front which gives you a chance to escape.

Side Nukes are a great addition to pretty much any ship type. You can launch them while getting closer to the enemy to hopefully hit and capitalize on resulting weak spots.

They are probably strongest when you are in a ram and spinning. You can launch them and your enemy will spin right into them destroying their squishy sides.

Side nukes are often used in combination with mine preload because of the added flexibility.

Structure Constructs

Structure is cheap and light and can be incredibly useful if used right.

Generally you want to use as much 3x1 structure pieces as possible since their health is the highest, and they also connect different sections with the least amount of material.

Ramming hooks

Info on Fions horns (by Luna)

As the name might suggest ramming hooks are most useful on rammers. They should allow you to:

• Tilt the opponent in a ram to get a better angle of attack
• Get a ramlock more easily
• Grab and hold escaping opponents using the hooks teeth

Bumper

Bumpers should be considered on any ship with large shields to protect them. Having the structure in front of the shield protects them much better but it will also be easier to damage that structure over time. Because of that the bumper is often placed slightly behind the shields.

Bumper like structure can also double in holding up your armor on ships like ion rammers.

Horn

Horns can be strong anti ramming tech and should be considered on any build struggling with ram locks. They are mainly strong on tb rails.

Ultra Light (UL)

The maximum speed of your ship is completely determined by your thrust/weight ratio.

Info

Formula for drag: $max(speed/75,1{)}^2*speed*0.4$

So here are some general tips on how to make your ship as light as possible. Following the advice here will make your ship zoom across the map at crazy speeds but also comes with some hefty downsides. Keep in mind that your ship will be more fragile, harder to control, have worse uptime and convoluted setups.

For many ships it is more effective to simply add more thrust instead of trying to reduce weight. For this reason UL should only be used on ships that already are built to be very light (decreasing weight by 1% on heavy ships is much less efficient than doing the same changes on a lighter ship for a 10% decrease).

• Armor is forbidden. Using shields for defense is the most common way to achieve this.
• Use as little walkways and corridors as possible. Even routing crew through slow sections should be considered.
• Remove any other part that comes to mind! Examples: Fire extinguishers and backwards or sometimes even small forwards thrust (at really high speeds the low thrust added might not compensate for the extra weight)
• Medium/small reactors: Makes your ship a lot faster because you have to use less walkways in exchange for worse cost efficiency and sustainability.
• Operator crew detach
• Supplier crew detach

Waste Ship

Waste ships are designed to be as cheap as possible just being sustainable enough to defeat other ships of similar or higher cost. They are mostly useful in Domination. Waste ships tend to:

• have no reactors
• have little to no ammo storage
• generally cut survivability and sustainability