Electric Shuttles - Needing a Recharge?

[CautiousChaos]

Hello all,

One of my favorite special ships is the electric shuttle.  They are certainly one of the more esoteric ships and they emit a pleasant area of electricity complete with nice sound effects.  But, you only get a handful of them (especially when compared to unlocking the same level of cruisers, fighters, etc) and their stats indicate that they are only effective against cruisers; and then, at a low percentage.   

They are immune to shields (good) but terrible against turrets.  And what do you find a lot of under shields?  Wait for it... turrets.  Anywho, are these little guys out of balance?  You only get around 40 of them per level of unlock and they are solely good against cruisers.  Terrible against just about everything else, though the helptext mentions they're good against starships. 

Anyone routinely using these unusual ships?  And if so, is there a strategy to using them that offsets their apparent trivial offensive capabilities?

-cc

[Haagenti]

They work best with lots of shuttles against lots of bunched up-enemies.This translates to:
- use them against incoming raids
- if you start encountering planets with 2000+ ships, a fleet of all your shuttles (with escorts) might also work wonders
- if an enemy does not use tractor turrets at a wormhole, you can jump in, do damage, jump out, recharge, repeat

But they're a pretty bad special ship, I think.

[x4000]

This is a good point, they have gradually fallen to the bottom of the list.  They are best when massed, as Haagenti says, but still weaker than I had intended.  I've added it to my short-term list to do some buffing with them.

[Haagenti]

Strike all my remarks.

Electric Shuttles are VERY powerful when massed on defense. I've been using 15 of them plus a cloak detector under a forcefield against AI-10 raids. The 150-ship raid warps in, crackle-zap, all dead.

And for offense I use Etherjets to catch enemy ships and bring them to my setup above to kill them. A 100 at a time.  And all they can do in return is scratch the paint on my forcefield.

EtherJets & Electric Shuttles....the key to extermination.

[x4000]

Hmm.  Are you playing on the version in which they have been buffed, or before that?  Maybe these ships need to have some sort of "charge time" on them or something so that they can't just blast whatever comes in all at once.  I dunno.  I'm not inclined to make any more quick changes to how they currently stand, though.

[Haagenti]

The unbuffed version. I have the Impulse version, so I don't do the interim-updates.

[Revenantus]

I too have the Impulse version, but it's still possible to manually apply the pre-releases if you wish to try them.

[Haagenti]

In that case, Impulse works better than Steam. I still won't spoil the 8 hours of work for my AI-10 game though

[darke]

Yeah, I've got the impulse version as well and I'm continually testing the updates, even with my AI10 game (benefit of the distribution mechanism not forcing any crappy digital restrictions management onto things ). Not that it's helping me much given all the bug reports I keep making.

[Admiral]

I had the Impulse version, but downloaded the regular (off his web site) version and use that with the key from Impulse. I also got a second key from the other site since Impulse doesn't like to let you buy more than one copy of a game as far as I can tell.

Impulse is good - but it can't keep up with X The Prolific.

I use the 1.000 to (whatever) full ZIP upgrade every major release, and the patch ZIPs for the minor releases (which I usually play).