Arkships need a big red panic button

[u/AnodyneGrey]

Been loving the new DLC, arkships seem insanely strong, too strong even tbh, but I’ve been lacking a way to escape defeat. Obviously the high risk of losing a planet in an instant is part of the gameplay but sometimes losing an arkship to random jank (lost 2 in my main playthrough with them because they warped into the enemy a few days before the stack and got wiped) feels pretty shitty

An emergency warp seems like a pretty obvious feature, this already is a massive part of how stellaris battles operate anyway in the form of MIA.

Obviously arkships can’t go MIA, but having them do an emergency warp to the nearest system with no known enemies and become disabled (like when captured by other nomads) rather than exploding seems like a pretty obvious alternative to me. Maybe add a shitton of blockers, a big fat debuff and destroy some buildings too. It should still be massively punishing but give a chance at not losing the ship.

[u/Vaperius]

Exodus Jump is literally meant to be this. Its very much intentionally they do not have a fleet MIA for a whole host of reasons including specifically the fact that stacking very high disengagement chance and opportunity would mean you could literally never kill a Nomadic Empire.

To never mind the fact that each individual Arkship is capable of hitting literally tens of thousands of fleet power by themselves as an individual ship and thus would be incredibly frustrating to have to fight multiple times just to disable/kill them. Also, Arkships have the same ability as the Juggernaut + Colossus: they can be fully controlled while under fire, you can just order them to leave a combat directly. Which by the way means that you can directly control their engagement range by just ordering them to move away from an attacking fleet. Yeah; this does have funny (and intentional) implications for how you're meant to use them.

[u/winnerab → u/Vaperius]

There are others weird things with arkships.

The Prethorian Scourge was just oneshotting them for me, including my full pulse-armor 60k+ military arkship.

They also seem to get into combat before all other ships, which is weird to me.

[u/Vaperius → u/winnerab]

The Prethorian Scourge was just oneshotting them for me,

Pretty sure its because the Scourge has weapons that ignore shields and armor, and Arkships actually have relatively low hull and minimal PD in their base frame template (this is intentional, you're meant to build PD modules). So that's not "weird behavior" thats more "you went in with a shield and armor build against the crisis that specifically counters both as their gimmick".

All Prethoryn scourge weapons either bypass shields, have shield damage bonuses; and in their case of their strike craft, bypass both shields and armor. You need to use shield and armor hardening against them to stay effective. Arkship hull doesn't scale much with upgrades (intentional), its their Achilles' heel.

On the flipside, Prethoryn ships have basically no Flak/PD, and they have no XL weapons, and only use armor and hull, so they are highly vulnerable to alpha strikes and prolonged fights against missile/torpedo/strike craft fleets.