Know your Unlockable Fleet Ship

[superking]

When I started out I mis-used every kind of unit horribly and was unable to find uses for the weirder unique units for quite some time. I didn't find any advice on their usage on the forums or wiki. I thought it might be cool to put together a community thread of your unit stratergies and tactics that can later be raided for the wikipages.

I would especially like to see some advice on getting the most out of:
+ dreadnaughts
+ spider bots
+ Anti-armour ships
+ Cutlasses
+ Vampires
+ Zenith Sentinels
+ Zenith Mirrors
+ Riot Starships
+ Infiltrators


Shield Boosters

My favoured start unit. If stacked can boost shields of surrounding allied units by upto 5x!. This isnt so important used with fighters or frigates, but with starships, space tanks and especially bombers it is off the chain. An MkII bomber has 1500 shields; an MKIII has 3500. However, a Shield Boosted MkII has 7500 shields, and an MKIII has 22500; I dont think I can stress enough how much tougher that makes these units!

My starting strat is heavily focused on speedy expansion and progress, on the logic that time wasted = more AI ships on adjacent planets. To this end, I tend to focus exclusively on DPS: Fighters and bombers only, mostly bombers.

I unlock:
Transports
Bomber mkII
bomber mkIII

Shieldboosters make the high MK bombers a great deal tougher and more effective, just place your units in a tight formation, set them to move at the speed of the slowest unit, and fly around in a tight group. Your bombers now have space-tank shield levels, only with 10x the HP!

For fast progress, I tend to put the 15 shield boosters into a transport with as many high MK bombers as possible, and fly around dropping them onto enemy gaurd and spec ops posts untill the planet is clean, then moving onto clean the next planet. Transports take damage moving into systems without supply, and your bombers only unload 10 at a time, but if you load up the shieldboosters first, they will be the first to unload (they then have the equivalent of 22500 shield, so they will likely survive until everything else has unloaded). subsequent unloads will enjoy the high shielding levels. demolish the target, load up again, and repeat! All the heil the shieldbooster!

The weakness of the shieldbooster is you will have less unlocked combat units, and little or no boost to your ability to combat fighters. Also, at only 15 extra vessles per unlock level, you might find yourself lacking in combat units to produce, forcing you to spend more of your knowlege to unlock units. You might find yourself somewhat envious of an ally with his vast fleets of microfighters!

[Spikey00]

>Infiltrators
Late game spam if you have it as a bonus unit.  Bring a massive fleet to a hostile wormhole and through, use the infiltrators to destroy the CMD station and allow the AI to go berserk in straight lines toward your cloud (square now) of death, unless the planet connects to one of your friendly planets, in which case there's a chance that they will head towards that way, meaning you're going to be cutting wrists if you have nothing to protect it.

Also a nice fast unit to quickly destroy train stations or do engine damage to a wave of units that you can't entirely.


--

Transports take damage moving into systems without supply

X3TC pilot:  Whaaat!?  You must be kidding!


There goes my plan in eradicating the non-seeded AI planets very early game.

[WinterBorn]

edit for 3.111

Vamps are one of my fav units for taking out guard posts, com stations, warp gates. Level 1= 113 vamps. Transport close to target and attack. I have even used them to kill off the AI homeworld guard posts. especialy if I've sent in an empty transport 1st to draw off the defenders. Main bonus is that they ignore FF. Main limitation for me is they don't attack turrets or ion cannons. But com stations, Guard posts, and warp gates, even if protected by FF are cake. If teleport defenders are killing them too fast bring some L1 fighters/bombers in the same transport to distract the teleporting defenders.

Raid ships: I usualy go for the wall template but need to play with the zapper for Raid L2 since it was buffed.
I see them as primarly engine destroyers to cripple attacking fleets before they get to my critical com station or capturables that can't be replaced. with some micro you can even use their force field to push crippled attacking ships out of attack range of fixed instalations.

tried the zapper - very short range relative to the other weapons tends to trigger at the 1st unit that enters the field. I tend to micro the raid ships to keep them alive and disable as many ships as possible. I have settled on Lvl1 (2 of 4) 2 mg, 2 lazer, riot shot and shield (other 2 of 4) sub tractor for shottie    Lvl 2 2 lt mg, 1 med laz, 2 riot shields (more regen than the single heavy shield) and the Ave It riot gun (10% engine damage floor) sub the tazer for Ave It riot if you want

to repair transports I bring a couple of engies - ion cannons will pop the engies though if no other targets are present
nerfed out

[Draxis]

If you have 3 tech II Riot Control Starships with tazers, anything within tazer range will be perma-paralysed.  I put my riots in a triangle around wormholes that have incoming attacks, and so long as there are not a lot of starships, they kill everything, on their own, with no losses.  Riot controls III's with two shield bubbles are fantastic to defend other ships.

Dreadnoughts work very well with riot controls and mobile repair stations.  You park the dreads within range of what you want to die, and cover them with overlapping riot shields, and then put a few repair stations underneath as well.  I have had hundreds of ships attacking this kind of phalanx formation and they just cant get through.  The dreads trash starships, and will one-shot most other ships engines out.  The riots do a heap of engine damage as well, and any damage to ones shield will get repaired very quickly by the MRS after 3 seconds.  Its not exactly resource efficient, and you need to drop the tazers on the riot control II's to get more shielding, but its very useful in defence.

[superking]

that riot tazer thing sounds crazy good in defence, imma try that right now!

[superking]

this shout goes out to my main main man, the Zenith Polariser. I didn't realise your potential before, didn't show you the respect you deserved...  but then one day I had to fight a difficulty 8 Mad Bomber and Electric bombers were everywhere in my base owning my com station and everything was awful, when I found you.

I was all yo dawg these electric bombers have crazy shields, the goggles, zey do nothink! but my main man the zenith polariser here? he does ker-RAZY damage to any unit that happens to have good shields, and a ship cap of mk1s cleaned out my systems faster than all bran

I further recommend my brotha from anotha motha in any situation involving space tanks.. you breavin heavy girl, I KNOW you hungry

I tend to only unlock higher MK these when I am sure to be facing units with heavy shields- either a Tank AI (space tank) or Mad Bomber AI (bombers Electric bombers) but they are extremely effective applied to the correct enemies.

[RCIX]

Dreadnoughts

These things are crazy good against other starships; insert into main blob, and watch enemy starships be flattened in a short period of time.

[superking]

wrong button

[soMe_RandoM]

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,3227.0.html
well the electric shuttles i wished u ask for eS but anyway
ai probely takes most consideration to electric shuttles thus making them the most prime target as they are cherry pickings when you are an idiot so be smart and it will back fire on the ai. electric shuttles i choices over anything most of the time. but they yust weak by them self and 1 by it self is weak but when organized well eg if you make 1 half shoot when the other is reloading half finishing. but if you could do this then you are doing realy well in making each ship count. as micro managment with these ship is one of the most demanding

[Sizzle]

If you have 3 tech II Riot Control Starships with tazers, anything within tazer range will be perma-paralysed.  I put my riots in a triangle around wormholes that have incoming attacks, and so long as there are not a lot of starships, they kill everything, on their own, with no losses.  Riot controls III's with two shield bubbles are fantastic to defend other ships.

Dreadnoughts work very well with riot controls and mobile repair stations.  You park the dreads within range of what you want to die, and cover them with overlapping riot shields, and then put a few repair stations underneath as well.  I have had hundreds of ships attacking this kind of phalanx formation and they just cant get through.  The dreads trash starships, and will one-shot most other ships engines out.  The riots do a heap of engine damage as well, and any damage to ones shield will get repaired very quickly by the MRS after 3 seconds.  Its not exactly resource efficient, and you need to drop the tazers on the riot control II's to get more shielding, but its very useful in defence.

Question on the riot ForceFields.... do ships underneath the the bubble do 1/4 damage like the buildable FF generators?  If so, isn't that more of a liability than it's worth?  I was always leery of trying out that loadout for that reason.

[rubikscube]

i think same as shield bearers

[soMe_RandoM]

zenith polarizers full fleet == Zenith Golem
there u go zenith mrk 1-3 damage == Zenith Golem Health
last i rember

[Fox Soul]

Long ago I looked down on the autocannons thinking they were weak.
But in one of my recent games I was stuck with them in a group of friends.

I unlock them fully having MKI-III and maxed out their cap, I used them for pretty much everything. I almost literally had no other ships produced.
They were awesome, taking down fortresses in 10 seconds. I had them strafing along groups of turrets destroying every single one in one pass, unless they had 400k health.
They didn't lost very long in MKIV worlds but they did do a noticeable amount of damage every wave.

If only I had infiltrators, then the group would of been much larger and deadlier.


Now for your request for ideas for cutlasses, I would say make a group of tractor beams at a wormhole and leave your melee ships with them.
Make sure you got a mobile repair in range.
I would imagine other turrets would help kill targets that are resistant against melee ships.
Also having a space dock in that planet with its fleet flagged to the wormhole would also help replace ships.