Really random collection of thoughts:
Anti-armour doesn't really seem to have any stand out attacks from memory. They're basically a missile-type of fighter with more range. I'd say they're a good all-rounder but I wouldn't pick them as a starting ship. (Opinion: OK)
Deflection Drone's "laser attacks on it, increase it's health/electric damage" seems on average pretty useless. Laser attacks are rare in comparison to pretty much anything else (other then sniper attacks, and they'll shoot at other things in preference anyway). But you can probably pull off some neat tricks with EMPs along with them, I've just never had them when I needed to use EMPs. Maybe if you were going against a bunch of Teleport Turtle AIs? Or one of the Technologist* AIs that cheat horribly to have every planet at Tech III or above.
They'll be plenty of Laser turrets on those worlds.
Eyebots sound neat, but I've tossed 60+ I've captured off an enemy to do a scout mission before, and they barely make it as far as a regular Scout Drone. They're nice to have in your pack of ships though when you capture them from enemies, since you never need to worry about scouts, etc anymore, but they just don't seem to have much value otherwise. Maybe if they increased cloaking on half a dozen ships rather then x1 they might be useful?
If you could send 300+ of them on a longish scouting mission, they'd be at least viable in comparison to, say upgrading the scouting tree to get tachyon scouts. I just have no idea how good the upgraded ones are, since the base ones suck so much.
They do have "ignores forcefields" though, so maybe they're decent at Tech III/IV against that sort of thing. If they were immune to shells as well as missiles, they would be good to take out special forces command posts with if they're hiding under forcefields. And they might be good against a small defense force under a forcefield, but they just seem to due too quickly for me.
Maybe if you could set them to randomly wander around a planet to reveal all the mines?
At a random thought, maybe if they were immune to the Counter-Spy buildings (and there were a few more scattered around the map on non-Counter-Spy AIs) it would be more useful, not to mention thematic.
(Opinion: Sucks as the first ship you get, but not terrible if you've already got a decent couple of ships already.)
Shield Bearers are, well, pretty useless I think. They're terribly annoying when the AI uses them, but I can't see their (logical enough) ability to be immune to nuclear explosions to be much use in your average or even non-average game. (Opinion: Sucks)
Spiderbots are decent enough ships in their own right, fast and healthy, long range, even though they fire a bit slow. Their special ability is, again, much more suited to an AI. (Opinion: Again, sucks as first ship, otherwise ok enough.)
Vampire Claws are actually rather neat. Fast, 660 damage per second, immune to tractor beams, self healing, are pretty much fire-and-forget. The only issue is using them as "group move" means they're less optimal for those who don't like micromanaging combat. They probably either need more health/shielding, or immunity to long range attacks (aka, missiles), since they don't have the regen of the cutlass, and half the health (and less shields). Though it doesn't say "can't be repaired" on their description, so they can be repaired by engineers and the like? That would compensate it (though probably a little too much), I'm guessing though that they can't be repaired due to their vampirism ability.
If they had teleporting, and the teleporting-AI was smart enough to only have them attack scattered ships, rather them bamf straight into a pile of 300+, they'd be useful in picking off stragglers, or random assaults around the place. And also even more annoying when the AI uses them against the player since they'd be tearing through harvesters left right and center!
From memory they're pretty decent to toss through a wormhole and have them soak up damage/chip away at the things before I send the rest of my fleet through. They they still die a bit too easily in that situation. (Opinion: Ok to Good, depending upon playstyle and what the map is throwing at you.)
Personally I find Space Tanks to be probably the most worthless of the lot. Slow firing; slow movement speed so they slow the rest of your group down when trying to group move; they don't have any larger engine health so they're just as vulnerable to spider bots as the rest of the fleet, even more so since they're always trailing behind because they're Too Damned Slow. Just all around suck.
They are useful as a good distraction to toss as a sacrifice to the Electric Turrets though!
(Opinion: *sad bunny in the snow* )
On a tangent, I think the ship I'm most happy to find in an advanced research is the Tachyon Fighters. They're not a ship I tend to start with often, since they're not particularly good out of the box, but they really do compliment things nicely and it's nice to have their cloak-detection ability to find mines, cloaked tachyon turrets, etherjet ships, and that sort of thing.
