Starting/Favourite ship discussion

[Shrugging Khan]

With the alternate champion progress, I've been dragged back into AIW. And right off the bat, I keep meeting anew my ancient nemesis (not that nemesis)...having to pick a starting ship.

So I'd like to hear other people's opinions on the various starting ship options.
Here's the ones I have the most experience with:

Zenith Bombard
- Fragile, expensive, requires extensive micromanagement
- Can't even hit most targets its range would be useful against
- Their extremely slow reload speed makes carrying them in transports non-viable.
+ Dat damage. Dat range. Great fun for sniping Hybrids, though I've yet to find a better use for them.
+ Zenith remnant is best remnant!

Spire Stealth Battleship
- Low damage potential, middling durability, limited usefulness against shielded targets
- Filthy spirelings!
+ No actual weaknesses, extremely useful for sneaky neutering raids, tachyon post killing sprees or data centre grabs
+ Dirt cheap

Vorticular Cutlass
- Low durability often sees them dead before they can deal much damage
- Provide no particular utility to the fleet
+ Cheap, fast, very good as patrol or low-power intervention group
+ Can be industrially spammed at vulnerable targets
+ Death or glory!

Youngling Tiger
- Micromanagement
+ Can successfully take down fortified structures at little economic cost
+ Speed and Power are far above its weight class, as is its durability
+ Low multipliers are offset by high overall DPS, making them more versatile than pure bombers
+ Blitzkrieg!

Please do share your favourites, or warnings about bad picks.
I'm especially interested in hearing about Railpods, Sentinels, Protectors, Hydras, Shield Bearers, Devastators, Siege Engines, Nanoswarms, Shrikes, Commandos, Vampires, Tanks, Corvettes, Raptors, Munition Boosters, Eye Bots, Chameleons, Electric Bombers and Autobombs.

[Tridus]

Protector Starships

- Adds no firepower
- Totally ineffective on its own, needs to stay in range of other ships
+ Negates enemy firepower in spectacular fashion. In fact, they let mk I Fighters and Missile Frigates kill a mk III Fortress.
+ Protected fleets don't die at nearly the usual rate. Thus offensive pushes can go farther than they could, and you spend less time & resources replacing fleets.

Against the weapon types they can protect against (which is the most common weapon types in the game), these are IMO the strongest force multipliers in the game. If you get up to mk III (and especially IV) the AI needs its goodies or overwhelming firepower to even touch you, and a fleet that would suffer heavy losses can instead come out almost unscathed. They save a fortune in ship rebuilding costs and time.

They're unquestionably my favorite ship. And the AI doesn't have any!

[Aklyon]

Railpods: Metal to Sniping DPS, in whatever quantities you can support via Dock or MSD. No self-attrition timer, and if one of them actually runs out of targets before they self-destruct from firing too much, you can technically repair them. If you run out of metal though, you'll run out of railpods fairly quickly. A bulk of these can make a significant dent in any level of AI FF, if you can keep them flowing you can take out the shield entirely (and all the nonsnipe-immune ships under it), but it would probably save you metal if you killed the shield with actual bomber types after the alpha strike damage. Affected by radar dampening, I think.

Sentinel Frigates: Not instant damage like other snipers. But they're a good long (loooooong) range attacker and don't require the constant flow of metal a railpod array does while in action.

Nanoswarms: Reclaimation Blitzkrieg. Emphasis on blitz, unless you micromanage them. Higher marks are more successful. They charge things and blow up, so like other younglings you'll have to replace them basically every battle if they attack anything.

[Draco18s]

Lightning Torpedo Frigates
+Decent firepower on their own
+Long range missiles (drones) that are mini warheads.
 + Drones absorb incoming fire
 + Detonate on death
 + AOE damage is pretty decent
-very low ship cap
-very expensive*

I neuter systems with little more than lightning torpedo frigates, neinzul enclaves, and riots.

*On ultra-low caps I get a ship-cap of 2 and the mark 1s cost 142,000 metal each (more than almost every mark 1 starship, only the zenith and spire starships cost more and those have a ship cap of 1).

[ZaneWolfe]

Spire Blade Spawners
-Complete and total inability to control the blades, thus unable to focus fire in any meaningful way, making anything less than full caps, preferably of all available marks, nearly useless
-Rather low durability, combined with limited immunites, make this fleetship rather fragile IMO, while their individual HP is in 6 digits, their cap hp is just under a 3rd what Fighters are.
-Very Low caps that are unchanged by cap settings
-Impossible to Cloak, limiting options when using them
-Heavily affected by Gravity effects, up to the point of being rendered nearly useless by powerful and/or large area Gravity effects
-Main weapons have limited range, sub-par DPS, and no hull bonuses or armor piercing.

+The immunites they do have, Reclamation, Paralysis Attacks, Being Insta-Killed are rather useful.
+They are rather easy on your economy, costing less Metal per cap than either Bombers or Missile Frigates, and less Energy per cap than any of the triangle ships
+Spire Blades are lightning fast with 1220 Speed, giving SBS effectively infinite range that ignores any form of Radar Dampening
+Spire Blades have rather high HP, and great armor, combined with their speed they are almost never shot down before hitting their target, unless Gravity is involved.
+Spire Blades have max armor pen, ignore Forcefields, and are immune to Tractors, negating every AI defense save Gravity or immunity to blades, the later of which only a few things have.
+Spire Blades are spawned every 2 seconds, dealing 100k damage*mark each blade, this gives a full cap of just Mark I SBS a DPS of 250k, Mark I-III a DPS of 1.5 Million, with an Advanced Factory bringing that up to 2.5 Million DPS, and if you're lucky enough to get a Core Fab, the total combined DPS of Mark I-V is 3.75 Million, without having to worry about Armor, Hull Type or Forcefields in the slightest, making them the ultimate (IMO) fire and forget weapon among bonus fleetships, you drop them into a system, keep them even remotely covered, and they will strip it bare of AI forces, and guardposts, in minutes
+SPIRE!!!!!

[Draco18s]

AI has spire blade spawners in my current game.

Unlocked riot starships 3 and gave them the riot gravity tazer.

Now they're harmless.

(Notably I'd have unlocked them anyway and given it the same loadout, because Tazer, the AI just got to their spire blades first)

[Qatu]

Just some notes, AI gets a few protector starships with everything AI, protector starships are also useful on defense to block energy bomb splash, and for bombards, the biggest negative is that they are focused by ion cannons, so they always die on system entry. I used to play them a lot but completely stopped some time ago since on 8.6 all systems have ion cannons and bombards only shoot 1 shot before dying.

Anyway, my opinions:
Most powerful: protector starships, blade spawners, sentinel frigates, spire corvettes, medics
Most fun: melee and neinzul ships are all really fun for making a bunch of docks shoot ships at enemy systems, and cloaked ships are all really fun for focusing on objectives

[Draco18s]

Question on medics:

Do they have reclamation?

The AI I'm fighting has them and there was a spot where I was watching my regular fleetships pounding away on two medic frigates and they kept getting reclaimed, even though I didn't see anything in the Medic description that said that they reclaimed units.  I can't be 100% certain that it wasn't leftover reclamation damage from a leech starship, but as the fleetships had been at full health prior to engaging the medics, and I'd have thought that the reclamation nanites would have been zero'd out (due to repair).

[keith.lamothe]

Ah, the showcase of the OP-but-too-hilarious-to-nerf


And medics shouldn't be reclaiming stuff, so I suspect something else was going on there.

Repair doesn't remove the nanites.  You can go through a wormhole for a "carwash" effect, though.

[Draco18s]

And medics shouldn't be reclaiming stuff, so I suspect something else was going on there.

Repair doesn't remove the nanites.  You can go through a wormhole for a "carwash" effect, though.

Ah, wormholes.

All I know is that I had some mopping up to do from a wave, so I threw a pile of triangle ships at the problem and was noticing that a lot of them were getting reclaimed.  And I know the only +reclaim ship the AI has was leech starships.

[Shoat]

My favorite so far has to be the Spire Corvette, especially in multi-homeworld games where there are more of them.
The new Zenith Hydra is a close second. I'm not really sure how much it contributes or if it's one of the better ones or not, but it's just a thematically cool ship.

Generally I like most "big" bonus ships (spire stuff, lightning torpedo corvettes, medics) as well as most "silly" bonus ships (suiciders, younglings, melee ships).
I WOULD like zenith siege engines aswell if it wasn't for the fact that they refuse to auto-FRD on friendly planets (meaning freshly-built ones will sit around idly when their planet is attacked instead of going in and helping with the big targets).

Protector Starships

...

... And the AI doesn't have any!

Wait what?
Today I saw a design backup for protector starships in a normal game, so I'm pretty sure the AI can have it. Not completely sure, though, since it didn't actually get to use them against me (I corrupted it right after seeing it because AI protector starships sound like pure horror).

[Tridus]

Maybe my memory is wrong, but I remember the AI not getting them at one point. Probably due to the modules.

Maybe it changed.

[Draco18s]

Probably due to the modules.

Maybe it changed.

It did.

[tadrinth]

Space planes.  They're fast, they cloak, and they have radar dampening less than their range.  The only way anything can ever land shots on them is if 1) it's faster than them,  2) it sneaks up on them, or 3) it ignores radar dampening.  And they have crazy bonuses vs heavy and ultraheavy, so they tear through fortresses (which can't shoot back).  They suck at killing force fields, and they're high cap so they're not very good vs AI Eyes.  There are probably a fair number of units in the various expansions that counter them, but there's very little in the base game that gives them much of a problem.  Raptors, basically. 

Zenith Reprocessors are a hilarious ball of fun to use.  Long range, cloaking, and insanely high bonuses: 8 Heavy, 8 Neutron, 8 Refractive, 8 Composite, 8 Polycrystal.  Acid sprayers, basically, except with an additional bonus vs Heavy.  Add in a low ship cap and immunities to mines, tractors, insta-ill, and reclamation, and you've got a heck of a unit.  The bonus metal is just gravy. 

Neinzul Youngling Tigers: Like bombers, but faster, cheaper, higher base damage, and an optional auto-retreat behavior if you build a regen chamber.  Great at hunting down hybrids due to their speed. 

Antiarmor ships are interesting.  Inside the triangle, they're like fighters: they counter bombers but are weak to frigates.  Outside of the triangle, they're like bombers, with huge bonuses vs heavy, ultraheavy, and structural.  Worse vs forts, due to the light armor, but better vs anti-polycrystal guard posts under glass.  The armor piercing, long range, and missile ammo make these pretty easy to use.

Munition boosters are amazing, but you're better off leeching these or capping a fab for Mark Vs than starting with them. 

I've never understood Autocannon Minipods.  They seem like they're mostly scary in AI hands due to the anti-turret bonuses; in player hands, they're going to get shredded by most of the things they have bonuses against.  Forcefields, fortresses, and golems also seem like things you don't really need to sneak up on. 

The AI is not supposed to get protector starships, as I understand it. 

[Arc-3N-4B]

I've seen AI protector starships in my game (against an Everything AI). They don't have modules.