That said, I tested your stuff, it cruisers now do their job, and combat lethality is better, however.
I still find the cruisers to be my weapon of choice, their range + hp is just good, the other units, just die, in BUCKETS as they get sniped/shot to pieces so fast. I still find no use for bombers, as I find it easier just park my cruiser fleet and let them chew down shields, it takes time, but I can use that time to build more ships. The casualty ratio is if anything less, you still can't get anywhere near a heavily defended shield with anything but cruisers.
Hmm, that's interesting, there are a number of things that Bombers (especially higher-level bombers) do over 10,000 time the damage of damage to. Pus, there is a rock/paper/scissors relationship amongst all the units in the game. Every ship in the game is weak to either fighters, bombers, or cruisers (as well as whatever else), so if you ignore bombers then you are missing out on something that is particular strong against 1/3 of the ships in the game.
If you're going to go lone-gunning with one ship type, I'd have to agree that cruisers are about the only one you can do that with. But as the opposing forces get stronger, get larger in numbers, that's just not going to work. When there are an equal number of fighters and cruisrs, heck even when there are sometimes fewer fighters, they will just eat the cruisers for lunch. Cruisers are weak to fighters, not strong against them (if you have 200 of something against 40 of something else, or similar ratios, that doesn't count -- you can't maintain that ratio all over the map and still defend yourself throughout most of the game).
More info, I find the starships useless, uhm the flagship puts out very little dps, and costs 60 x the price of a cruiser doing only 3x cruiser damage. Well this goes for the scout starship the regular starship and the flag ship, I can eventually unlock the one which does 9000 per shot, it may be useful I guess.
Starships are intended to be used in addition to the rest of your fleet, not off lone gunning. Very little in the game is useful for the long term when used by itself. The scout starships are mainly just very resilient mobile eyes, their combat strength is very low. The Light Starship and Flagships are each good at killing Mark I and Mark II ships respectively -- for their cost, they will do more damage without dying than the equivalent smaller army (and you can retreat with them and repair them when their health gets low, thus making their cost-to-benefit ratio even better).
The main things that will hurt the utility of your starships is if you:
1. Try to take lower-level starships against higher-level enemy ships (this often goes poorly).
2. Take only starships to an enemy planet (without support ships with them, they will take too much damage).
3. Ignore the arrival of anti-starship arachnids at the enemy planet (those will just eat your starships, so that's another reason you need to have support ships there).
The other benefit of Starships is that they are immune to nukes and EMPs, so they are particularly useful when used n concert with EMPs to take down a highly-defended planet, or a warp gate that is highly defended. Also, massing your starships will tend to be a lot more effective than having just a few, but even then you still need supporting ships to take some of the fire from enemies and to deal with the arachnids that might come out, etc.
Starships are trickier to use than just staying with the smaller ships, and this is by design. I had a hell of a time balancing these so that one of my alpha testers in particular couldn't just abuse them and obliterate enemy planets without ever building a real fleet. Starships are not intended to be a substitute for a real fleet, but they can be a highly powerful augmentation to a full fleet if used properly -- but proper use does take time and is more difficult, so I can perfectly see why your initial impression was what it was. I'm going to add this to the mini guide later today, it's such a great question. Actually, I'll add the cruisers thing, too, because that also seems relevant.
One last thing, fighters are good against cruisers, while cruisers in general are good against fighters, making the fighters a bit useless, also fighters are useless against bombers, which is the one thing I'd like them to do imho, as bombers are fast and so are ceptors, but instead bombers are good against fighters, thus leaving me no chasedown force to deal with bombers.
Fighters are strong against cruisers, not the other way around. But otherwise you are right on here. That's one of the really useful things about bombers, there is nothing very good out of the base toolset for chasing them down. Your enemies will use that to their advantage, and you can likewise use that to yours. Another useful feature of bombers, that ship you find useless so far.
That said, I'm still new, so my observations may be flawed.
No worries, these are great observations and stuff like this helps me to make sure that someone isn't finding balance flaws. You have some great points overall here -- and in the early game, perhaps spamming cruisers is a fairly viable strategy on some planets, but that's really not going to work except in the first hour or two of a long campaign, so the strategy ultimately isn't something I've witnessed as sustainable. My alpha group also went through a phase where they spammed cruisers, but in 4-person multiplayer that' no longer a valid strategy in our experience even during the early game. So as we got further one, spamming that unit, same as we used to spam parasites or starships or cutlasses, eventually fell out of vogue.
Anyway -- thanks for the great observations and questions, those will make some very important additions to the FAQ.
