Starting Ships?

[Joneleth]

Hi, I've played this game for about 15 hours now and among all the startings ships I've tried i only found I liked 2 of them. First one is Autocannon: Extremely cheap, can be massed in start for quick expansion, good for assasinations and/or raids because invisibility and ludicrious speed, still effectively function as meatshield in late game.

and Bombard: Simply because of range and damage, after you established a beachhead in a sector you can bombard the rest of the sector with them.

I've tried all the other ships but didn't really feel i gained anything special from them that i couldnt get from my regular ships (except Tachyon fighters with their cloak revealing skill but they proved worthless in battle right off the bat).

Is there something I'm missing or is there gross imbalances in the starting ships?

[x4000]

I think you're the first person to ever say that, at least to my knowledge, so I think it's something that you'll just want more experience with the game for to really fully see.  There are a few starting ship classes that people tend to like less (tachyon microfighters is often one of them, actually), but there are others who like most every ship class.

Autocannons are actually another one that a lot of folks don't really care for as much -- and depending on who you ask, the bombards are too expensive and not their favorite.

In other words, my point is that a lot of times it boils down to preference and play style.  In the strategy subforum, check out the "favorite bonus ship" threads (there are several), and you'll see lots of people talking about their various favorite bonus ships, with not much consensus at all on which ones they like best, and wildly variant reasons why they do/don't like a specific ship class.

I won't claim the balance is perfect, but it's been beaten on and refined by hundreds of commentators on the forums for a year now.

[Joneleth]

Well maybe balance wasnt the best word to use, but my point is considering its suppose to be a unique starting ship. It should offer something Unique! Besides the 3 mentioned ship classes (and maybe electric shuttle) none of the ships does anything that cant easily be achived with the generic ship classes, so yes almost all of them can decently hold their own in battle but beyond increasing your ship cap it feels like you wasted a Unique ship class on something generic.

[x4000]

Hmmm, I really don't think you've looked at them very carefully, then.  There are dozens of special abilities and powers there, and the strategies for using most of the ships vary wildly.  I don't know what to tell you, other than that the very uniqueness of all these ships and the possible strategies are one of the features that get most touted by people who love the game.  Some of that comes down to raiding ability, or the ability to pull off certain sorts of offensive or defensive moves, etc.

Examples, for the sake of argument:

Raptors - you might not see much that's unique just looking at their stats, unless you notice their speed.  Their ability to "kite" the enemy is unparalleled, and can lead to wildly different tactics.

Tanks - sure, these can be somewhat similar to bombers in function broadly-speaking, but because of the high shielding of these guys they can get where bombers sometimes can't.

Parasites - capturing ships from the enemy to use for yourself?  Awesome.

Paralyzers - great for delaying the ingresses of big waves, or particularly big ships.  Nothing else can really do that to the same degree.

Raiders - sure, these might look similar to fighters or similar at first.  But the ability to get past tractor beams unscathed is pretty amazingly useful and really makes these guys feel very different.

Planes - similar to raiders in some respects, but weaker and with cloaking.  This makes them better at striking from cover, if you put them in low-power mode until they reach their target.

Viral shredders - a von neumann (sp?) machine, in essence.

And so on and so forth.  Every ship has a niche of its own, and is useful in various situations.  Maybe snipers not so much at the moment (we're always tuning the balance with feedback from folks).

Hope that helps!

[superking]

teleport battlestations are hyper mobile and can annihlate most other ships for cost

armour ships are ridicuously awesome against turrets

zenith mirrors reflect all incoming fire back at the attackers - if 100 ships are firing at a zenith mirror, that zenith mirror is effective firing back with the power of 100 ships too- and can make more glass cannon ship types self pwn in a few shots

zenith polarisers are excellent against bombers, and off the chain against spacetanks and other heavily shielded types. best of all, none of the base units have any damage bonus against them so they are massively resilient vs fighters/bombers/cruisers

vampires combine mega speed, regening HP from damage and awesome DPS for an instant solution to raiding

shieldboosters can make normal bombers into super-high HP fast spacetanks, making higher MK bombers (100+K hp) ridiculously tough

higher MK autobombs can annhilate hundreds of lower MK ships instantly

infiltrators fire through shields

spiders destroy the engines of other ships



I agree autocannons are awesome- invisibility, resilience AND speed

[Joneleth]

Raptors - you might not see much that's unique just looking at their stats, unless you notice their speed.  Their ability to "kite" the enemy is unparalleled, and can lead to wildly different tactics.
These I'm not sure what to think, they seem like a jack of all trades master of none, their most pronounced trait is their speed, but speed is mostly best in some sort of raiding, if they ever have to tag along with the main fleet their speed is not much use in my experience. Then they cost an enourmous amount of metal which almost forces you to choose between them and bombers unless you wish to wait years for your fleet to fully build. In the end with their range, dps, speed and low life they could be a form of skirmisher in early game but as soon as you hit your first tractorbeam then they lose all functionality. Seeing as they cant be sent in first to soften up the defence and if the main fleet already has entered the system then the enemy tends to ignore them and focus on the main fleet.


Tanks - sure, these can be somewhat similar to bombers in function broadly-speaking, but because of the high shielding of these guys they can get where bombers sometimes can't.
Thats assuming that you need your bombers to get somewhere without cover from your fleet, which in my experience is a suicidal waste of resources (diff 7), I dont recall ever having meet a target to tough for a cheap raiding unit to kill and at the same time not being a goal for the entire fleet to simply attack.


Parasites - capturing ships from the enemy to use for yourself?  Awesome.
Their reclamation is cool yea, but their biggest problem is they cant mark ships for reclamation, it only happens if they kill it, which is hard if they follow the main fleet seeing as they dont have a significant damage output. A single Leech starship is easily better than a horde of these simply because it can mark 40+ ships for reclamation on every shot.


Paralyzers - great for delaying the ingresses of big waves, or particularly big ships.  Nothing else can really do that to the same degree.
I've never gotten these or Viral shredders in a mapseed before, after I saw your reply i even tried to make 10 new mapseeds without luck, how do i get these as start ships?


Raiders - sure, these might look similar to fighters or similar at first.  But the ability to get past tractor beams unscathed is pretty amazingly useful and really makes these guys feel very different.
These I really dont understand. Yes they are immune to tractor beams BUT they have shit for life 8k at mark 1 if i remember correctly, and they cost alot of resources 300/300 for mark 1. For the same price I could get 6 Autocannons which had significant more life, double the speed and invisibility. Yes Autocannons can be tractorbeamed but i can built 1000 autocannons for the same price of 150-200 raiders of same mark which will give me enourmous amount of ships to sacrafice to tractorbeams while moving invisible to my mark.


Planes - similar to raiders in some respects, but weaker and with cloaking.  This makes them better at striking from cover, if you put them in low-power mode until they reach their target.
These I had not encountered before, but with significantly increases attack, reduces building cost and added invisibility I can see how these are excellent raiders, but besides having a little more shitty life (5k difference at mark 1) they are superior to Raiders in every way, which brings me back to what is the Raiders function? Yes the life difference is more pronounced at later mark lvls, but at later planets theres so much defence the raiders are going to be dead long before they reach their target anyway.


Viral shredders - a von neumann (sp?) machine, in essence.

And so on and so forth.  Every ship has a niche of its own, and is useful in various situations.  Maybe snipers not so much at the moment (we're always tuning the balance with feedback from folks).

Hope that helps!


But I suppose in the end its a matter of opinion.

[x4000]

All of the ships come up eventually in the seed list. But, there are I think 39 ship classes and only 8 options per seed, so it can take a while.

One thing you might also be overlooking are the various bonuses, etc, that lead to the strong/weak differences. Check out the wiki for more info.

[Joneleth]

Well with 39 Ship classes there will be alot I havent tried, even though i tried +20 map seeds I've usually only ended up with around 10-15 different ship classes.

[Rustayne]

Do you have the ship type on normal when you start the game?  If you have simple, your losing a ton of those special ships.  I think x4000 is right though, it all really comes down to taste, and what style you play.  My personally, I love infiltrators, due to them being able to fire though shields.   Some games require these more then others, but overall it comes down to taste.  Another thing that x4000 stated that is very important, is that ships are weak and strong vs other ship types.  It kind of creates the rock, paper, scissors type of gameplay, where 1 unit type is super powerful or can be used solely to kill everything.  Give the other ships a test and try, you might find mid game that you really like them. 

[x4000]

That might do it, if you're on Simple instead of Complex for ship types.  That limits it to just the more vanilla, easy-to-use ones.  Things like EtherJets wouldn't even show up, because they're so quirky to use effectively.

[Joneleth]

Seems like I've been playing with simple ship types, didn't even know that option existed... Guess I have alot more shiptypes to explore

[x4000]

Excellent!  Yeah, most of the more interesting ones are not in Simple, so that would explain a lot.

[Fox Soul]

You can start with multiple planets too allowing you to mix ships early on.

Some ships alone appear to be weak but when mixed in with other ships they seem to be more effective.

I've had polarisers and infiltrators and they proved to be a formidable fleet.

My friend also liked the bombards but he mixed it with the shield boosters making them more resistant against enemy close fire.
He also threw in a few triangle ships which made his fleet even more deadlier to anything in close range.

[RCIX]

That might do it, if you're on Simple instead of Complex for ship types.  That limits it to just the more vanilla, easy-to-use ones.  Things like EtherJets wouldn't even show up, because they're so quirky needing of micro to use effectively.

Fixed for you

Anyway, a few of the more interesting ship types that i know of:

Force field bearer - has a relatively small force field (compared to stationary generators) which drastically increases the longevity of your fleet units.

Cutlass - a powerful melee unit which owns against most mobile units; it attacks by sacrificing some of it's own health.

Laser Gatling - they may seem fairly middling, but they're actually pretty effective at taking on most fleet units. They are expensive to cap out though.

Anti-Armor - a long range and bomber-type weapon (gets bonuses against forcefields and fighter classes IIRC) makes this unit really good.

It also seems that you're underestimating the use of speed in thisgame; it's a real pain to have to haul around you fleet at whatever painfully slow speed you have. If you can run around with crazy speed, then you can more often than not ignore the ships that try to chase you and simply go for whatever target you want.

[Dragon]

Yeah, I have to agree with the statement about speed.  In most of my current games, by the time I get to middle to late game, my fleet generally consists of a raid group of capped out Raid Starships (all 3 mk levels) for taking out targets, and then the rest of my fleet for clean up duty and defense.  I rarely send my fleet into a system that still has a command station in it, and normally I'll take out the command stations of the systems beyond it as well, before moving in and clearing it of the now disabled turrets.  I haven't actually tried using Raiders or Raptors in combination with the Raid Starships, because they haven't been one of the ships I started with yet.  But yeah....

Also, just looking at the statistics of a ship doesn't really help much.  That really needs to be fixed, because there are a lot of ships that look like they are really poor, because they have low damage values, and then you go to attack something, and whatever it is just dies super fast.  A good example are Eye Balls.  They look rather weak, but if you put them against turrets, a Mark 1 Eyeball can take out most Mk1 turrets in a single shot.  Except tractor beams, which I find rather annoying when attacking, but something I'm glad about when defending.  Although I have mostly stopped using tractor beams....