Post your unit ratings here!

[RCIX]

I was reading this and it talked a lot about rating characters into tiers, and i thought there's quite a bit of similarity between characters and your special ships, so i thought i'd start a thread to help gather data on the overall strengths and weaknesses of all units in the game.

Please only one post per user (at least for rating purposes) and edit your posts as you get more info.
List the name of the unit, as well as a breif description of what you've found about it and your "tier rating" for the unit.

I'll start this thread with my opinion on units:

Cutlasses: Very powerful overall, only ineffective against structures. Perhaps top tier.
Autocannon Minipods: Weak, but has high staying power and great at taking hits. Bottom Tier or barely middle tier at best.
Laser Gatlings: Perhaps the best choice at least for some; It is good all around and only weak to cruisers and forcefields. Top tier for certain.
MLRS: Haven't used these much but they seem to be just.... blah. Middle tier but really seems to just be chaff to me.
Munitions Booster: Haven't used these much but they seem to be highly promising. Most likely top tier. Used these a little more and this is most definitely highly powerful. Stick them on snipers and you have a complete planet defense! Use Spider turrets if you want to deal engine damage. Won't handle waves but stick 10 on a planet with a few munitions boosters and you have yourself a raid-free planet! Top tier for sure.
FF Bearer: Not really useful in that it's coverage area and health is small. Garbage tier.

[El-Ravager]

No comment on the more special units, I have not played with them enabled yet.

God tier: cant think of anything

Top Tier:
Laser Gatlings: you can have a swarm and they do good damage. Good ball of death unit.
Raiders: Absolutely integral to my play style. Good damage vs buildings, tracor beam immune and super fast so they can take out key structures in a hurry and get out of dodge with ther numbers mostly intact. my choice of unit to go in first to kill that pesky TL IV Ion cannon.

Middle Tier:
Cruiser/Fighter/Bomber: they work like they are supposed to.
Space Tank: Good unless a specific counter shows up, but too sluggish to be better tier.
Armor: need micro to work as a fire-absorber, but work well in that role. They are again too slow for me to really like thou. Mainly middle tier for the good survival, I dont have to replace as many of them as I do of other units, but Id never choose them as a starting unit.
Lightning Shuttles: would be top tier if they wouldnt waste their 1st shot. very good thru a wormhole, but I cant be arsed to micro them for a proper first strike.
MLRS: decent but nothnig spectacular.

Bottom Tier.
Autocannon Minipods: far too situational. Only good as a fire absorber really, if you are willing to micro them a bit.
Bulletproof fighter: they die a LOT and only work agianst select few units.
Tachion fighter: good for decloaking, dies too much to be better tier. Only along for the utility
Nanofighter: again, dies too quickly. Of course they are extra cheap so that doenst matter too much in their case, but still in my playstyle i prefer to have at least somewhat durable units..

Garbage Tier:
Space plane: whats up with these? I have not found anything they are truely good at, except being fast and dieing a lot. Faced with building these or nothing I tend to bunker the resources to use for replacements later on. *edit* and to top it all off these things are supremely annyoing when the AI has them, not because they are dangerous, but because they are hard to catch.

[x4000]

FF Bearer: Now that forcefields take damage from shots fired from under it, this is totally useless. Bottom tier.

Bear in mind that change doesn't affect FF Bearers.  It just affects "strong" forcefields, aka the really large dedicated force fields used by players.  These guys are as useful as they ever were.

[NickAragua]

Edit, having almost finished a 60-planet game with a buddy (we've been playing since september) and just having a core world left, here are revised ratings (pretty much completely revised, btw):

Top Tier:
Raid Starships - these are excellent for dealing with lightning turrets and electric shuttles, and raiding.

Raptors - excellent quick response unit, with a long range so they can take on electric shuttles.

Electric shuttles - the bane of my existence in the hands of the AI, these will completely decimate an entire blob of ships. Less effective in player hands because the AI doesn't bunch up as much, but still extremely useful vs waves / CPAs.

Mobile Repair Stations - I like fixing my units rather than having to build new ones or maintain engineer fleets.

Scout MK III - with a full cap of these guys, I've been able to scout out virtually the whole galaxy on a 60-planet map.

Mixed Bag:

Laser Gatling - more useful in the early game than later on, as they die in droves and are only about as fast as fighters.

Parasite, Leech Starships - Getting free units for killing AI dudes? Yes please. Of course, they're not nearly as effective nowadays with all the "recent" nerfing, but still.

Space Planes - despite their silly name and weakness, they're actually pretty effective in a quick response role, supplementing raptors.

Bombers, Fighters, Cruisers, Basic Turrets, MLRS Turrets, Missile Turrets, Tractor Turrets - these have their strengths and weaknesses, and I'm happy having them in my force.

Autocannon Minipod - When the AI brings a few hundred mark IV minipods to your systems, runs them past your defenses and starts blowing up your mining facilities, they're pretty effective. When you're just relying on twenty reclaimed mark IIs, they're not very effective.

Bottom Tier:

Sniper Turrets - Initially, when I saw these, I thought "Oh no, the bad guys are shooting at me from across the map, my fleet is going to die so I better take these out quick." Turns out, you can pretty much just ignore them. On defense, since you get them unlocked right off the bat anyway, they'll help you lock down one or two systems at most before you run out of cap.

Space Tanks - Too slow to get to the AI systems in a timely fashion, and only mildly useful on defense as the AI will often not stand and fight, but rather just spread out through your system and blow up mining facilities. I guess if you need to use your resources for something, you can build these.

[laxrulz777]

Top Tier: Teleport Stations. Don't let the numbers on these fool you. You should have a full stack (all marks) built as often as possible (I dedicate one station to building just these). On AI 7 and 8 (haven't gone above that) they completely take out the wormhole and guard post defenses. You'll lose between 5-10 of them each time. On the AI home world, just teleport them close to a guard post, then away. Then, when the guards roam away, back to the guard post to wipe out the defenses. The fact that they're great for mop up is also fantastic.

High Tier: Teleport Raiders. Not nearly as useful as T-Stations because they're absolutely terrible against turrets. Still very, very useful (note, these are good against bombers and t-stations are good against fighters. Both are about average against cruisers. A blob of both of these is a completely competent fleet in it's own right).
Laser Gatlings. Nuff said, I think Chris will swing the nerf bat at these a bit at some point.


Variable: Depending on your other units, Etherjets are either awesome or terrible. I enjoy grabbing cruisers and carting them back to my blob of fighters. Others have talked about the joy of parasites with Etherjets. The possibilities are endless.

Mid Tier: I actually like the Autocannon mini-pod. I use them on system defense for mop up and they work well at that. I'd like the higher marks to have just a wee bit more bite to them, though.

Low Tier: FF ships. Maybe it's just me, but these don't seem to have the usefulness that I'd really like. If they were faster and could keep up with fighters it might be a bit different (get the fighters to have some defense against the initial bomber wave they pass through). The fact that they can't fight for jack doesn't help. In my playstyle a defensive unit needs to be REALLY good at defense to justify the cost and these don't really do that.

Vampires. I think they need to heal more when attacking. They seem to get mowed down even when attacking good targets. Maybe it's just me again.

[Velox]

     Good:
     Munitions boosters - these aren't mobile enough and die too easily for offensive use.  However, they effectively increase each of your turret caps by 5x or more, which is awesome.
     Deflector drones - pure awesome.  Fast, long range, immune to all fire from a number of ships, and shreds cruisers like nobody's business.
     Raiders - burn all the guard posts in a system to bedrock in minutes, wonderful for "neutering" AI planets (or just about anything else.)
     Teleport battle stations and raiders - again, great for pinpoint strikes against a key target (depending on which unit you have and what the target is) without having to slog halfway across a planet to reach it.

     Average:
     Eyebots - nice as a turret-sweeper and the scouting is a handy bonus, but prone to dying.
     

     Poor:
     I've only found one use for FF bearers - sitting them over the munitions boosters that in turn are planted in the middle of a turret ball.  That way, the turrets can be close enough to a wormhole to still hit through high shields but the boosters don't get scragged by the first cruiser to warp in and look at them funny.  Otherwise, I've found that they're an answer in search of a problem overall.

     Vampires: if they're planted directly on top of a wormhole, they might get a few hits in on incoming ships.  ... and that's about it.

     

[laxrulz777]

     Vampires: if they're planted directly on top of a wormhole, they might get a few hits in on incoming ships.  ... and that's about it.    

part of my dislike of Vampires is their very low unit cap. Why not allow a player to have 100+ of these? Was it that way in the past and it was unbalanced?

[Kjara]

FF's do decently scattered in the middle of a cruiser swarm(as any cruisers covered by them won't be able to be hit by fighters and the fact they do reasonable damage to fighters).

[Spikey00]

Top Tier
Leech Starship, even though that isn't quite a special unit.  rofl.
A ship of a thousand kind.

[RCIX]

FF Bearer: Now that forcefields take damage from shots fired from under it, this is totally useless. Bottom tier.

Bear in mind that change doesn't affect FF Bearers.  It just affects "strong" forcefields, aka the really large dedicated force fields used by players.  These guys are as useful as they ever were.

Really? I know they were damaged by snipers, when snipers still damaged FFs. I'll have to try them again and see. That would still leave them in bottom tier since they only cover about 5 units at a time (the MkIs at least), and the units they cover only gets around 10k health at max realistically (due to the force field shrinking as it takes hits).

[x4000]

FF Bearer: Now that forcefields take damage from shots fired from under it, this is totally useless. Bottom tier.

Bear in mind that change doesn't affect FF Bearers.  It just affects "strong" forcefields, aka the really large dedicated force fields used by players.  These guys are as useful as they ever were.

Really? I know they were damaged by snipers, when snipers still damaged FFs. I'll have to try them again and see. That would still leave them in bottom tier since they only cover about 5 units at a time (the MkIs at least), and the units they cover only gets around 10k health at max realistically (due to the force field shrinking as it takes hits).

Oh, I know what you were thinking of, I think -- at one point during the prereleases it was a bug that was causing them to be damaged like the bigger forcefields.  That was fixed before 2.0 official came out, though.

[Spikey00]

I think the FF Bearers just got ever so slightly useful... will have to see in-game if I ever have the urge in choosing them as a specialty ship!

[Vaos]

I just saw someone today (Zuul) taking worlds with infiltrators exclusively. One thousand of these just rip through everything it seems.
Infiltrators are also very annoying when used by the AI. In that same game, every wave of infiltrators just ran off to our inside planets. Every lovably time. Quite hard to stop them when you get 500+ waves! (Not taking in account the one time where a Raid Starship came along and obliterated my tractor beams)

[RCIX]

Correct me if i'm wrong but aren't they a swarm unit with low health?  Then attack them with Grenade launchers to take down the swarms.

[Vaos]

That was in a Non-Expansion game. But yes, grenade launcher seems a logic counter to those.