Important note on the Contingency! You MUST either: a) Wait and only fight them after you have blocked the ghost signal. b) remove sapient combat computers from your ships. (Autonomous and psionic are fine, sapient gets a debuf from the ghost signal! Switch down to yellow if you have to.) The sapient computers on the contingency designs have left a fair few people confused so I wanted to add this!
Never played with 25x crisis, but always play against 10x all crisis in my games. And I think that missile tactic is really great against Prethoryn Scourge. You can remake your frigates into neutron launcher/missile build, and make aircraft cruisers. Put all of possible variations into aircrafts and last slot can be made with 2 middle class and whirlwind missiles. The real problem in all of this crisis is Contingency. They just need to be prepared for. All of the times I met them - I was just smashed or barely held them till 2500 happens 😅
I have gotten them twice in my home system with 600 hours played. I beat them in both cases but not without them crashing my economy from just destroying my homeworld.
I have a friend who is rather... crap at the game and didnt have many planets or systems and only survived by virtue of me and my friend being his neighbors. Then the unbidden spawned in his capital system, destroyed everything and broke him mentally for a time. That game was an immediate restart.
@@mlgsty8880 Back when the old ftl, tile, and border systems were still around, I played a pacifist empire and had barely any ships when the unbidden spawned right next to my capital. The only reason I was able to survive was that I spent insane amounts of influence to colonise a tiny, low habitability planet at the edge of the galaxy. I went down to less than 10 pops, slowly grinding out a habitat and claiming the last unclaimed patch on the side of the edge galaxy opposing the unbidden. Incredibly slowly I managed to scrape together the resources to make a few more habitats, and eventually start work on a ringworld. Roughly 80 years from the start of the crisis i was finally able to rejoin the struggle of the galaxy that had just barely been holding on thanks to the fallen empires. That was the first time I had ever beaten a crisis.
I had the best moment in my life when, small galaxy, I was in a galactic war with the big three-faction conglomerate when unbidden showed up. In the middle of a transit system. My navy just flew by and I never had a clearer: "no stfu"-moment. Drive-by and unbidden was gone again.
I prefer massed carrier builds myself. One thing you never mentioned, and I noticed, you had Sapient Combat computers on all your ships when going over the Contingency. Those suffer a -50% penalty at the start and only gradually weaken as you crack their worlds. So, either psionic combat computers or advanced combat computers should be used instead vs the Unbidden. Fun fact, Unbidden have 50% shield hardening. Or, at least that is what the tooltip says any rate once you can see the loadouts on their ships.
@@cheetahman2830 You can find it under "Empire Modifiers" in your main government window. Just click on your empire's flag in the top left corner of the screen, make sure you are showing "modifiers", and scroll to the bottom of the list. It will display the current "Contingency Signal Strength" and mousing over it will show the impact on Sapient Combat Computers and, if you have any, synthetic pops in your empire.
@@roymundchf8917 Personally, I think the Unbidden need a permanent 75-100% shield hardening at all times. As it stands right now, they just evaporate under missiles and strike craft from ranges far beyond what they can respond to. The slaughter is even worse if you get lucky and get the Zroni and have a few Zroni Storm Bastions between them and your core worlds. They WILL suicide on them like lemmings.
Something to note about the Unbidden; they get 40% shield hardening in systems with a dimensional anchor. That was a nasty shock the first time I lost a bypass fleet to a fight I "should" have won.
Tho if you really want to mass corvette swarms do work against crisis as well, about 400-800 of them will do the trick (taking out a single fleet with minimum losses), and are quite cheap and fast to build
3:00 doesn’t artillery class take the median of all weapon ranges for the range it’ll try to stay at and not the mean? Strat made a video on that so you should be alright to add marauder missiles even if they won’t be firing all the time due to range.
One thing that makes the unbidden so easy is how they target psyonic empires first. In a 25 times crisis run, I had them make a 1 system thin line through half my empire while they tried to attack a spiritual fallen empire. So I always faced one or less fleets of them and they never really attacked me as long as I "raided" their fleets on their way to the fallen empire. Their portal was only 2 systems away from a system of mine, so I could just sweep in and kill it after a few months
My preferred all rounder crisis fighting ship is the Focused Arc Emitter battleships with the hangar core and the 3 aux slot stern sections. That gives 1 hangar bay and a bunch of M slots for Whirlwind missiles. It bypasses Unbidden shields, fends off Prethoryn swarm strikers, has great range for kiting the Contingency and can continue inflicting damage while the X-slot is turned away /out of firing arc. Although this video focuses on ship design, high levels of research into repeatable weapons damage and firing rate technology is the key to beating a high multiplier crisis. Energy weapons and strike craft are easy to focus on but kinetic weapons, missiles, armor and defense platform buffs all compete with each other within engineering. So I have turned away from kinetic weapons in my own PvE meta in favor of missiles. Kinetic weapon also have that default 75% accuracy which just begs you to use up an aux slot for an aux fire control instead of an afterburner or regenerative hull tissue.
Nice, I switched up to missiles as well. With repeatable researchs into missile fire rate + damage is truly underestimated. I honestly like my whirlwind destroyers, they just hit hard and cut through the enemy.
Thanks for the video Montu. I got absolutely shredded by 10x Unbidden using mass torpedo cruisers and stealth frigates this week. The Alpha strike didn’t kill as many as I hoped and my fleets got disintegrated in 1 min 🤣
I've always found the high level contingency the hardest faction to beat, probably because in the past I didn't commit to the naked FAE battleships. I did notice in my last run they had some minimal hardening, I'm guessing its like the synthetic leader trait? Just 10%. I also found it difficult assaulting their bases when the system had a gateway or hyper relay positioned in range of their weapons. It really sucks you can't choose to approach from one of the hyper lanes when the other methods are considered higher pathing priority. edit: I needed to use corvette screens to beat those systems...poor corvettes.
The anti-anbidden cruiser - would it really get closer to the enemy with marauders? The artillery computer uses the longest range weapon for distancing if i remember correctly (even if it uses the median it would still use 120). This would mean that in an ideal case, the marauders would never fire, but if something goes wrong because of jump points, multiple fleets, or system size, the marauders would give a bit more firepower in situations where you need it.
Due to end-game lag, you don't want too large a galaxy, so I'd say small to medium (I play on 400 stars with the standard number of empires) and everything else is up to your taste, to add variety to the playthroughs.
@@mathhews95 1000 stars is just too epic to pass. Thousands to tens of thousands of ships warring across the whole galaxy in titanic battles for the ages! I could commission paintings of such glorious vistas! I mean, I kinda am, seeing as my poor laptop takes around 10sec to render a frame in these late-2400 battles. WHATEVER, WORTH IT!!!
@@MEUAR in general I like large maps too. But I don’t like it when all star systems become owned and there’s no neutral territory whatsoever. There need to be natural hazards/obstacles (abandoned mine fields; littered asteroid belts, etc) that remain neutral territory even in late game
@@Jasons073 To keep that sense of wonder, that idea of still having uncharted territories beyond the frontier of your empire eh? I get you. Closest we can come to that is pacifying space fauna and creating some kind of reserves for those beautiful space whales! Or like building an impregnable goddamn Ligne Maginot around crisis spawns and let them marinate there as a "barely contained unknowable threat". But that's not the same yeah.
Can I ask for a specific guide? A way to benchmark progress in the game to know if you're playing well or not? Basically, where should you be on total research / fleet power / resource production every 50 or 100 years in the game?
For research, a good rule of thumb is 100 research for every 10 years into the game. So at 2260 you should aim for ~600 research points minimum. Stellaris is a snowball game though, so while you might be under that mark early on, you can quickly snowball research. For resource production, honestly just try to keep a surplus while increasing research and alloy production. Fleet power is harder because it depends on what you're trying to do/whether you're playing to conquer or just to defend your space, but having 80-100k fleets by the midgame is a good benchmark. Against 5x crisis, you'll probably need about 2 million total fleet power by endgame, though you can get away with less if you optimize for the specific crisis faction. At that point, your individual fleets are probably in the 200-300k fleet power range.
I think the general indicator on how well your run is going (at least on default science cost and pop growth) is how far you are from 10k naval power and 1k research at 2230. Though I too would like to see a video going into details about checking progress.
For min tech in PvE, I use this simple formula: total_tech_output (phy+soc+eng) = years_into_game * 20 (low end: * 15) So in year 2230, you wanna be at min 30 * 20 = 600 (low end: 450), in 2250 at 1000 (750), in 2300 at 2000 (1500), and so on.
I'm pretty sure the general indicator of how well you are doing is what your rating is against other empires. That is the entire point of that mechanic.
It shows how much the game changed. It used to be the Ubiden was considered the most terrifying threat. Though to be fair, they did get a bit nurf without having large slot arc weapons, which can now penetrate shields and armor and have a range of 100..
Thank you, I was struggling against the unbidden and keep losing to many ships. Now with these cruisers and good artillery battleships I'm turning things around :)
Me (Getting obliterated by the Contingency) : That's it !! let's see if there is any tips about how to beat them ! Montu (literally one hour ago) : Got you fam.
@@xxknitlerxx5045 GE mod has some wacky and really good things. You can built attack moons or planets out of actual ones in a solar systems, they have massive fleet power.
2:55 Wait, if you have the artillery combat computer, doesn't that make it so the ships stays at the maximum range of their farthest reaching weapon? So equipping the marauder missiles should not have an impact on how close the ship gets, right?
You are on a content spree mr Montu! I assume after vassalizing EP2nil you acquired his content library and decided to repurpose it for better use! I for one welcome our lizard Overlords!
For the first time ever, I fought a crisis. This was legit 20 minutes ago and I got my ass handed to me by the unbidden. I destroyed 4 of their fleets or so, but they had another 3 coming in. Now I'm here trying to educate myself on proper crisis safety. Quick question though, is this still up to date? Sorry, but I'm a newer player and no clue about changes since 9 months ago. Thanks for the helpful vid! Quick edit: Do I prepare each ship design ahead of time or do I have time to build the appriopriate fleet after the crisis spawns? This time, the unbidden spawned about a third of the galaxy away from me, so I had time, but I'm unsure whether I just got lucky.
I just had gray tempest swarm the galaxy (my fault) with 150k fleets. I had no chance so I did al all out rush of their capital system and destroyed the fortress with barely any fleet strength left. Maybe five years later, the Prothyn scourge showed up (about six months from first warning to first appearance). They were brutal, but I managed to fight them back. Then I had two fallen empires awaken on either side of my empire and start hating each other. One just attacked my federation member, so about two years after the scourge was defeated, I'm at war again. They have 2-3 million fleet power, so I'll try hit and run harassment with my psi-jump fleets and hopefully scoop up their better tech through salvage. This game is exhausting but thrilling. I've never had such back-to-back crises before.
This sucked. I was 12 hours in, managing planets, having 3-4 fleets with 40-50k power, building megastructures and then all of a sudden, some alien species from another galaxy came and obliterated all i had built.
The losses will be astronomical with the Corvettes. 😂 I can say that lol. went against 25x crisis but I was smart, i was basically stealing enemy mega shipyards via either war or annexation and when the contingency arrived, they were greeted by around 10K units of Corvettes, i only killed maybe ¼ of them, but I had 7 ecomonopolies set up and I just copied fleet designs and just reinforced like idk, madman? I think i used up around 3.5M alloys? At the end of the war I was left with nearly 20K corvettes and MASSIVE LAG. 😂 But i did lose around 150K units? It was just fun to see them dying in the hundred lmao. Good times.
I'm confused about ship's AI combat tactics. On the Unbidden carrier design you argue that adding marauder missiles would be bad because they'd cause your ships to want to fight from a closer range, but on the Prethoryn battleship you fill small and medium slots with plasma weapons and still equip afterburners for kiting. Wouldn't the short range of the plasma weapons mean that those battleships simply charge straight into the fight?
The pretoryn have pretty fast ships so their smaller ships will reach your fleet anyways. The AI makes sure the fleet will try to kite back and do a decent job against larger Pretoryn, while the lower range weapons will target the smaller Pretoryn ships who are already close. After the small Pretoryn are dealt with, then yeah the ships would close in the gap a bit more, but by then most large Pretoryn will likely be dead anyway, so it's mostly a non-problem.
With unbidden ships, your plan is to completely be outside their range, which makes their weapons useless. Scourge ships are fast enough to actually get within the range where those other weapons are useful. Your ship won’t get 120 away anyhow so no point in trying to kite
Watched this video in prep for my first playthrough; unfortunately the Unbidden spawned inbetween a fallen empire and a really powerful hive mind and procceded to get absolutley eiffel towered and defeated in around ten years
Against normal strength of a contingeny crisis, i armed all my ship with afterburners, focused light-arc-bow-emitter and all available slots with disrupters. defense are as many shields as energy allows it. Targeting computers to run in with the whole fleet as quick as possible and then give them hell.
I think i need a video to fight against an awakened spiritualist fallen empire at year 2260, 😅, but i set all 3 crisis so this will be useful too. Thanks Montu. Btw i really hope that 3.10 stop the vassal spamming for the ia
In my experience the best way is to have two different types of fleets for fallen/awakened empires. One with full disruptor corvettes or cruisers to fight their fleets and one with either artillery battleships or torpedo cruisers to fight their starbases. The fleets all have very, very low hull compared to armor and shield but the starbases have massive amounts of hull and will rip apart a fleet with only disruptor weapons.
If in my game settings I'd choose all 3 crisis with x5 strengrt, are they all each strong as one x5 crisis, or only combined? So it can translate to either x5 or x15 one crisis. My favorite play style is Inward Perfectionism ignoring everything, letting the crisis consume the galaxy, then resettling it, with xenos already destroyed by something else.
Hi, i know this is out of place and can't find a solution online so far, but the whirlwind missiles show up on the g slot for me and not m or s. Idid read they where moved but no idea ehats up on my game. Im on console with out the the fifth and sixth expansions if that makes any difference. Any helpis appreciated.
only thing i saw was for unbidden the rockets had 0-120 then u said in the small slots you put nothing because the marauder missiles have less range at 120 (yes they have 100 but u said 120)
How to defeat any foe: Have a really good economy and fleet cap; this way, even if you have (comparatively) shitty ships, you can still overpower them, lol.
If you select the new "all" option for crisis type then all three crisis will spawn in a random order, each crisis being twice as powerful as the previous one.
I stopped using juggernauts because even with the great aura, the juggernaut will cut your ship production by a third, at least if you rely on ca. 2 mega shipyards like I normally do. How reinforcing your fleet works is that Stellaris will just split the queue by the amount of ship yards amd assign them, so the 2 shipyard juggernaur will get as many ships as a 20 shipyard megashipyard with ship production boosts
@@robguy8501 yeah, but it for some reason did. I don't know if it was fixed in recent patches, but when I played my juggernauts queue was always full while my shipyards got nothing to do
Thank you for that incredibly helpful material. I love your ship design videos as they are really good and explained clearly. Do you plan to make something similar about "general" battleship/titan/juggernaut/defense platforms? Or about designs vs Gray Tempest/Fallen Empires/Khan/Leviathans etc. for us being able to beat them early instead of just flooding them with much greater fleets? I'm good at the economic part of the game but I really suck with creating my own designs (and fleet composition even more). Especially with archaeo-tech, which I don't use in general because of then being so different 😅
Im really just getting into it myself and i would guess Torpedo Cruiser against Fallen Empires and Leviathans because those do more Damage the bigger the Target. Not sure about the Gray Tempest but Khan (the 3 Times i had him) was never even an Issue as you only have to defeat the Flagship and then the Rest desolves into a new Faction
@@fuchsmichael93 for Leviathans I was usually making huge fleets of cloaked frigates with torpedoes, stealthy flying very close to a Leviathan and then attack from point blank range, but it feels like cheating and should be good for any Leviathan. About FEs, I'm not sure about torpedoes, as the smaller ships are packed up with Point-Defense. And all of their ships have Strikrcrafts. They have enormous shields and armor, so I'd go with ignoring weapons like disruptors. And wait for them very close to the hyperline point, to start the battle from very close range to not losing my ships before they be close enough to hit with disruptors. But I don't have any other ideas, and I'm very lame with fleet compositions - I'm used to monohull fleets
Creates 5k corvette fleet Go on crusade from choke point to choke point. Rebuild ships. Keep up and keep orbital nuking all planets including non-crisis.
Unrelated Question: I got the DLC Federations (already had a few others) and now my Game crashes every 1-2 Years. Graphic Driver is updated. Has anyone ever had that Problem and knows a Solution?
I laughed at the naked penetration battleships until I saw that upkeep for them is 3 times lower compared to fully-slotted one and it got me thinking that one might try to make only these until the type of crisis is know
Could you imagine being a civilian that survives a 150X all crisis universe. Not only have billions probably died in the process but now they’re all defeated the economy basically doesn’t exist because it was all directed towards pumping out battleships. That’d be a rough couple of decades if not centuries of economic recovery.
I was vassal of an AI. My AI overlord declared war and attacked me. I didn't insult him nor did anything bad for our relationship. Our relationship was green and we had every pact from research to immigrant etc.. And I was still his vassal even while he is attacking me! This must be bad programming and needs to be fixed.
a simple and no brain choise, build massive t34, similar the pen only-class battleship, a cheaper version of him, Remove the accelerator, remove the acceleration accessories, and bring a level 1 engine. Because they are very slow, if there is a long-distance battle, you can shoot two more rounds first. If there are a lot of T34s, they will be cleared out at once. They are very cheap, so you can overpopulate them in large numbers at will. You don’t have to worry too much about maintenance fees. Likewise, you don’t have to worry too much. Casualties, they are consumables. A standard battleship will be in danger if it gets close, let alone the super slow T34. Of course, this is a brainless solution, a solution that works but is not very efficient. Personally, I would add a crystal board, and then bring some missiles or passenger planes or something else depending on the type.
In my experience Unbidden kiting with artillery computers doesn't work, even with Jaggernaut aura it's very unreliable due to messed up ship computer behaviour. Ingame tooltip says ship stays at max range of the highest range weapon, but in reality ship engages at that range and fly away from enemy ONLY when enemy is at around half range of the highest? range weapon, which means you will take heavy losses or plain lose the combat, if your dps is low. Also artillery computer is so messed up, that if you ever put PD guns on your battleships - they will fly into melee range. Carrier computer + strike craft is the most consistent at keep enemy at 125 range, but strike craft has slow dps build up and systems has borders - you can't kite enemy forever. tl;dr; best tactic vs 25x crysis is alpha strike with 3x torpedo/disruptor cruisers, get around 2-4k naval capacity of them, attack only lone fleets, rebuild lost after each fight, add some arc emitter + strike craft carrier battleships into each fleet to force engagements at system range, and 2 artillery aura titans with only perdition beam and NO other turrets.
I thought that too, but after rethinking, flak performs well against strike craft with shield and no armor like the normal strike craft. But Prethoryn craft have no shield but armor, so i look at them like missles with high evasion. Point defense nevertheless needed but actually the anti missle thing even though its not easy to get high tracking on them. Prethoryn strikers have 80% evasion afaik. Point defense against missles has only 30 base. But with picket computer and scanner its 30+30+15 =75, so there you go.
I had the Bitcoin enemy spawn right next to my Capital world. Lucky i was preparing a Huge 12 fleet army of 110k each i went over and destroyed them withhin the Minute of them spawning i never felt better xD
If prethoryn scourge is running away from a predator larger than them, and that predator is following it, something really nasty could be coming to the galaxy after the scourge....
So... get long range weapons and kite them, get long range weapons and kite them, aaaaand... get long range weapons and kite them. I'm starting to suspect afterburners are a little too good.
Range 60. You don't want to be in close range with the crisis, especially at 25x 50x or 100x Their weapons kill you with a single shot. Firing first is your main advantage as a player
how do you deal with excessive pops in stellaris they are just keep growing and it becomes a major headache later in the game, when you are playing with few planets
You know speed is key when the juggernaut class is faster than the unbidden. Also even tho i play on the console version (cause rip my pc trying to run the game) were missles cant go in the M slot and share the slots with torps. But hey this still helps alot here.
