ES2 art of war, kinda

While war can be entirely avoided throughout the game, certain fighting, with pirates enabled is usually inevitable, so it is handy to have a know how on how to achieve good results even in unfavourable matchups.

Do not hesitate to ask questions in the comments section, the guide can be edited, tips can be added.

Current version the guide is meant for is 1.0.52, this version is still fairly post premature release and there will hopefully be major changes coming up.

Here is a quick rundown to what is new in the game throughout past couple months (as of patch 1.0.70):

• Short lasers no longer suck, they became a really good option for fleets that can outlast 1st phase so basically a meta. (considering short meets medium scenario, they even hit on first turn and kill on second, hurray!)
• Fighters and bombers matter if you use bigger ships, get them, use them, their tech is shared with beams, so it's a nobrainer. It is generally a good idea to have at least one fighter wing up on those support ships, it technically makes them storng dps ships and they can still carry your mods around, hurray!
• The military scavenging law got a boost again, so have that going for killing CPs. Couple laws good thrown around a bit, pacifism is a strong backup peace option.
• Certain OP hero abilities got a slight nerf, but they still matter.

For victory and profit

Don't do war unless it's worth it, for militarist governments this is usually a no brainer, but there are other things that come in mind when making fighting worth your while!
Be careful not to get caught up in a drainy conflict early game if there are multiple opponents, it might slow one of them, but others will get you!

• On CP kill profit
• The Scavenging law enables you to get up to 50 dust and science per CP kill, it does not scale incredibly well, but still provides decent value for repairs and retrofits. 20 CP killed is 1K dust but more importantly 1K science.
• There are mods which can be literally stacked in your favour, when fighting easy opponents such as respawning pirates, equip your support ships with bonuses on CP kill, if you have fleet of 10 support ships each providing you 45 science on kill, kill 1 CP, you get 450 science surplus for the turn. Bear in mind your surplus can only reach double your science production. No need use going beyond that.
• There are also influence per CP and dust per CP mods, but I prefer science, although it only has a T1 version, you need to loot the T2 which you usually won't.
• it is actually easier and potentially cheaper to assimilate through combat means, simply drain manpower with siege mods and attack, easy, cheap, clean, the race will hate you for a while but you have the trait and system
• as vodyani, you can use a heavy-drain fleet to invade systems to make new Arks on the go and reduce enemy system pop through negative food so they can not conscript. (you can't drain riftborn though), this gets a lot more efficient with T2 drain and higher
• Helps you expand onto opponent planets, yey, just make sure not to overdo it, cause there are things like overcolonization, and jingoist paradise only takes you so far. (but certain religious law is unlimited *cough*)
• 

Knowing is half the battoru

Optimizing your ship setup:

• There is no perfect optimal setup, you have to adapt to what your enemy is doing, while he is probably adapting to what you are doing, there is however a safe bet to go with mostly: be bigger, faster, stronger.
• Get strategic mods ASAP if you have the strategics for them, titanium kinetics work well even in endgame, they have the best anti missile efficiency, they are a good thing to go for, unless you have a hero with 80% energy damage and hyperium.
• Having better mods wins you (un)evenly matched fights, having ships with more mods unlocked wins you fights. (one ship with titanium kinetics can take out 3 ships with T1 and with luck even T2 kinetics - learned this the hard way)
• You want the extra manpower from food anyway, so go for those extra mods on small ships
• strategic mods are actually cheaper industry wise, but you do need those strategic resources, you can also buy them from market
• Try upgrading only half your fleet to new concepts, this will make it more versatile and crazy to deal with, you can even play mindgames and show that your latets model has short beams as a bait.
• Support ships are actually OP, do not dismiss them, but you need hyperium to make them work with all the shiny mods.

Did someone order +1 movement, +200 shield -15 manpower/turn and +15 science on CP destroyed? Oh it was me, and I ordered it 10 times...

Support ships are great because:
• + fleet movement bonuses stack and help a lot, especially with riftborn. (I herd you have slow fleets, so we put some fleet speed bonus on top of your fleet bonus, suddenly 20 movement np.)
• + fleet shielding stacks aswell, since energy weapons are the meta, you should get some of those in the fleet, combines with personal shield ressistances on ships gives you hell of a buffer
• as mentioned above, on kill CP bonuses stack aswell, get science while you fight, win win
• titanium siege mods are a must for reasonable siege times, if you get to siegeing
• Support ships draw fire from your dps ships, giving you more overall dps, cause your dps ships live longer

Good early game fleet:
• 5 attacker ships, preferably with at least one kinetic for antimissiles, rest long range beams, you can split tank them, or just go kinetic tank if you have the shields on your support ships, but that relies entirely on what your opponent is bringing.
• 5 support ships, bringing whatever mods you need +speed/+shield/+science per CP destroyed/+siege
• I personally prefer to stick to small ships until I have extra mods unlocked (which need T2 stratetics, so it's pretty late or never), but watch out for barrage card
General No-No's
• Missiles look good on paper, but are easily countered, through kinetics and short range tactics.
• Short beams look good on paper, but are easily countered, through simply selecting long range fleet tactics.
• Don't get me wrong, they both can work under certain situations, which do not occur too frequently, so let's say it works everytime, 20% of the time.
Identifying weapon systems on enemy ships:
• is actually really simple, just compare it to your own, guns are so different that it usually is a dead giveaway
• Spot easily countered stuff and adapt your strategy
• Low short range efficiency and kinetics = missiles
• Only short range efficiency and energy = short beams
• Certain pirate ships only use missiles, know this, use this to your advantage.
Don't forget to:
• Check all ships in the enemy fleet carefully, you might be catfished into thinking it's a stupid short fleet, but only the first ship is, rekt.
• That minor faction bonuses from Mavros (-10% ship cost) and Hissho (+20% weapon dmg) are gamebreaking, try to get your hands on those

Hero usage

Ok, let's assume you have a fleet and want to engage, do you have a hero that would help it? Right heroes are OP, bad heroes are sadly irrelevant.

• Heroes with fleet dmg bonuses are great help, look for racial bonuses to specific weapon damage to win you fights - cravers kinetics, sophons/vodyani - energy weapons etc.
• Perfect hero is the vodyani starter, you get guardian bonuses and vodyani bonuses resulting in about 200%+ bonus to energy damage in the endgame, being just flat retard proof, unless retard uses kinetics instead, even then, like 120% dmg bonus only, lol
• If you are at a real risk to having to use your hero outside your system and can not groom a spare one from market for this purpose, you should opt for those dmg bonus skills
• Hero ship dmg bonuses are mostly irrelevant
• Try to only have heroes attached for fighting and otherwise have them on systems, fighting gives ridiculously little xp
• Seeker heroes make fleets extremely mobile with their T1 off-lane movement bonus, use those to rush enemy home systems while they are stuck in front.
• Upgrade hero ships to increase their SWAG, and tank them well, they get a lot of aggro (and have lots of slots to stack avoidance with engines)
• Buy heroes if your starters suck, you can and should do that you know...
• level up heroes quickly through building/buying out big stuff
• Know your enemy's heroes and their potential bonuses, so you understand why are you going to get rekt and how much more you need to tank
• Some heroes have - ship cost bonus on system, look out for those, OP, it's also one of the T3 minor faction specific skills

Burning light is burning bright, your ass, as early as T2 skill can

Actual space fighting

Oh goodie, we are engaging now, all ready?
Oh wait, it's stuck, have to reload the save... ah it only took 2 minutes to resolve, nevermind...patience is a virtue.
If you are in an MP game of more than 2 people, do not watch battles

• You risk it will crash your game and you will have to restart and miss out the whole turn or two and slow everyone down
• You will slow the turn down

For starters:

• if you don't know how space combat works, view couple fights in singleplayer to get a general idea
• Cards are important, but you can adjust your fleet placement in advanced settings, the range groups are fixed, you need to move ships inbetween them for optimal results on demand, if there is a combat timer, you have to move them fast.

Range

• Every card represents three rows of ships at a set range, those ships will engage enemy ships on opposite rows and whatever else they can reach afterwards
• Ships approach each other through combat phases
• Medium range is potentially in short range in 2nd and 3rd phase depending on the opponents choice = you get wrecked by short beams in phase 2 if their fleet survives phase 1
• Long range is in medium range in 2nd phase, and short in 3rd phase.
• Range is defining to your combat strategy, having missiles means you will get countered by short ranged kinetics, having short beams means you will get countered by simply the fleet being set at long range and killing you before that.
• having versatile ships makes you uncounterable, which is why short beams and missiles suck, or only work once, or only work on retards

Crit

• Crits are nice, mostly become relevant once you have big ships you can stack crit increasing mods on, crits ignore defenses
• There is a combat card for increased crit damage (but features short range positions)
• There is a combat card to negate any crits in the fight for both fleets (oh you build crit huh? would be shame if someone...)

Card bonuses

• Are relevant but mostly secondary to the range provided on demand, read, select, make the best of what you have, some can be game breaking at the right moment.
• Since there are races that can basically faceroll any engagement with their heroes, you might have to simply outnumber and wreck them card bonuses being an important bonus too. Good luck with that

Advanced (results) view

• Advanced view enables you to pull advanced shenanigans, you can for instance move all your ships to one lane - for instance you are facing short beam ships, you want to put all the ships into the long lane, so you get 2 phases of free kity fire
• Advanced results enable you to better understand what did you do wrong, or what did opponent do wrong, learn from your and their mistakes, cause they might aswell.

Advanced tactics put into practice (pictures - range, cards, results)

Here we shall have some typical David vs Goliath scenario
Our happily participating volunteers are sophons beam fleet vs not so happily participating vodyani missile ark (made by endless AI).
We shall observe on this following example how

• Missiles are bad
• AI is silly
• Range matters
• Lanes matter
• Cards matter
• Solo Ark stats are mostly just paper

Oh lookie here, that circle looks grim, I mean green, 75% of military power on enemy fleet? Wicked!

First picture shows (in advanced view) how we have potentially weaker fleet of ships fighting against an uber ark (stats are overrated) you can see the ARK is missile based, I am using basic cards, making sure to select short range formation, my fleet is automatically split out into two lanes (which will later prove to be a mistake)

What the second picture shows is what happened after the battle, of course I won, cause (endless) AI uses short range engage on a missile boat (and while she was up all night, she actually did not get lucky), but that's not all we can observe from this picture.

• Notice how I have lost part of the ships in the first lane, even though they were "at short range", this is because the ARK was in a different lane and thus was in a medium/long range to the first lane fleet.
• The report states the ark was dealing damage in spite of being at short range with missiles, what it does not indicate is which ships the damage was dealt to, but you can see that from all the not-short ships being destroyed.
• Honorable mention goes to card bonus which succesfully ate away a large portion (over half actually) of incoming damage, saving the other ships on the lane 1.

But yey we still won, whatever right? Anyway let's see the same scenario, only done a little smarter with a slight change....


This is basically the same situation as in the first picture, precombat arrangements are same, but this time, the first lane of fleets was moved to the second lane, because if there is only one ship, it can only be on one lane, the lane being the middle lane. Let's see how that will make a difference.


Yey, AI did not dissapoint, short range engage with missiles, cause crit4life. What about sophons? Oh, no losses, as you can see, all ships were at short range all the time, ARK simply could not deal damage cause missiles don't work at short range and there were no ships on other lanes it could shoot to. Well rekt.

Of course should the AI have used "power to shields" or some other long range option, it might have ended differently, but since I was always using the short range setup I was guaranteed that - should I survive till 3rd phase, I would probably destroy it in it, while it could not shoot back.

Dirty tricks

All is fair in love and war... especially if you are a questionable character, know bugs? use them, enemy surely will, or agree on not using them (like not picking horatio, muhehe)

• In terms of racing who manages to click things first, host wins, host more games, but have a good PC and bandwith, or die,
• Defenders have it better, repair your ships after every combat and watch the enemy army wither one by one, of course, you gotta click quickly, you gotta be the host or lucky.
• Dusty races can easily change their fleet setup on a whim, play mindgames, show silly fleet makeup, then bring something else
• If you need it to win, be a berk tryhard, set up peace only to prep up invasion, why not, but be ready for consequences
• You can retreat after unsuccesful invasion and then invade again, same turn, really, just need to bring new manpower in, rinse and repeat to drain conscription pop fast, give them rekt delivery ASAP

On the ground

• Usually the ground battle is guerilla vs conscription, guerilla offers most efficiency to attacker, conscription offers most defenses to defender
• If possible engage once you have sieged away all extra manpower, that way you can usually win systems in one turn, otherwise conscription and decent army profile should hold even with low manpower, unless you have endgame techs for extra dmg etc.
• Tanks are rather early tech and you should go with 100% tank profile ASAP., infantry is useless without special traits and aircraft is fairly endgame, by that time, you will still stick to tanks, cause you will have them upgraded the most.
• You can drop off your manpower and go somewhere else, for instance go grab a refill or go mess up another system, no more sitting around like in ES1, you can make it annoying by having your opponent need to click through 10 combats a turn and if their defense infrastructure is not solid, you are hitting hard.

Manpower

• Is generated from food income at a % which can be adjusted by random events, the alaways available law and system upgrades (Patriot pills, Exotic rations) and also faction specific technologies like horatio food upgrade (once you have food to industry conversion, you can scrap the extra conversion to increase your production yield), specific minor factions also generate manpower
• To quickly generate manpower one can use "not so infinite" upgrade Chain gang (N-way fusion tech) to instantly (next turn) turn one pop unit (or essence in case of vodyani) into 300 manpower, this essentialy means that with spare pop you can get 300 * number of systems manpower next tern whenever the need arises
  Upgrade however blocks construction queue and it's use it thus inefficient and should be avoided by having a decent manpower stock available at times of need.

• Empire manpower is an invsible stock where manpower goes to and comes from, capacity of this stock can be affected by faction traits, faction quest rewards and military technology tier
• Fleet/System manpower depletes said empire stock to fill available capacity - this means upgrading systems, producing fleets can deplete empire manpower rather quickly, fleets refill manpower at a % rate when orbiting systems (even the enemy systems, actual rate and numbers unknown, but there are bonuses to it)
• Manpower is then used to invade or defend systems in ground battles by converting available values into units as dictated through your empire troop diversification.
• You can adjust your % army values at any time prior to the actual pre-fight conversion. However if the battle has already began, only new units (from conscription for instance) will be converted.
• Remember that adjusting the troop layout costs manpower, adjust prior to producing fleets, so you actually can adjust.
• Manpower pgrades matter (but don't upgrade troops, upgrade and get armor), Techs matter
• Systems under siege do not produce manpower, you can however bring manpower by ships and they will join the battle next turn from the orbit

Influence overtaking

• easily countered through war (can't covert someone you are at war with)
• fairly infrequent in MP, but not impossible
• watch out for the trees, their influence is in the vines
• dunno if they fixed it, but probably still does not work for vodyani, and I am not sure it even should

Politics and laws

The state of your affairs may make or break you combat capabilities through laws, I suggest you check each government law carefully in game to get a better understanding.
Remember that republic can have 25 to 100% stronger laws at the same price.

The laws have tiers which limit how many election cycles does the party have to survive (political experience and also party support) in order to have access to said law (at least that's how I understand it, it's probably different but hey, manual does not really say much about it)

• Laws either superpower your fleet effectivity or make them easier to produce thus their efficiency.
• You can change laws every turn at no cost (probably a bug)
• Laws applied just before you press fight still apply even if engaged before.

Obvious subject of interest are the military laws

• T1 = -15% cheaper ships
• T2 = +25 dust and science per CP kill
• T4 = +50% dmg on ships and troops

T4 law is an obvious gamebreaker, but can be difficult to reach and maintain
T2 is very strong early game, with republic its +50

Also interesting are science laws

• T1 = + 2/3 movement on ships
• T4 = + 30% dmg on ships

And no less interesting are the industry laws

• T2 = +15% indy per strat deposit +1 strat deposit value
• T3 = + 30% ship hp
• T4 = + 4? indy/pop

Technically if you are in democracy, it should be possible to reach and maintain even both of these laws at once, unfortunately you can not affect the elections that way and it is probably more efficient to run one law with republic at increased effect.

Influence costs

• Are high. but actually pretty buggy, you can enable law, benefit entire turn from it, and if it's expensive enough, it will autocancel by the end of turn, so...IT'S FREE (example: have 200 inf, law is -180 inf) next turn law was disabled, I have 250 inf, I had the bonus entire last turn.
• Tough to compensate for with unhappy pop
• Get Interspecies HR unique upgrade early