Mechanical Units

[Silvius Fabricius]

In multiplayer most of the factions' mechanical units (the land units and fighter ships) never seem to come into play. Apart from Ix, the only factions where the mechanical units ever seem to be used are Corrinos (the artillery, and sometimes the bombers) and Ecaz (just the war banners).
I feel like they should be rebalanced to be effective enough to see use; as it is most games the only use for fuel cells is to get the frigate and sometimes atomics, and it seems that the whole mechanical branch of the tech tree is ignored (except for the Fremen who do something totally different with it).

[Soho]

I think Smugglers want to get at least 1 Scavenger drone (or maybe 2 in case one gets sniped) because of the bonuses you get having it along with your pillaging ball, but yeah there is no reason to have more than a couple, and at some point in late game you are going to ditch them for more command points for snipers/free company

Same thing with the Atreides Support drone- it can be very useful to save your veteran wardens in fights that you were going to win anyway... but you probably need those extra command points for more rangers/troopers/wardens to win the fight in the late game

I have seen Harkonnen builds where they try and abuse combat probe spam... it is pretty niche. They can be annoying harrassers/point-of-interest scavengers, but just like the other factions at some point you need all the command points you can get for a beefy main army and that doesn't include these. You might use your last couple command points for a couple of these to throw away for more bloodthirst stacks... but tech all the way down that branch of the red tree for that? Nah

The fighter ships- for all factions- I agree that they are pretty meh. Almost zero reason at all to ever get these... their dps is meh, yeah they have mobility and immunity to worms but they literally cannot kill anything and they die in a heartbeat. They are basically ornithopters that can shoot back, but cannot investigate question marks on the map. If you take your eyes off of them for a second they are literally dead. I guess the intention in the current iteration is to force your enemy to have at least some type of anti-air in their composition (Fremen have to make a couple donkeys, Harkonnen has to make some gunners, etc)... but this is so niche as well

An idea would be make the tech at the bottom of that center red branch something more meaningful for these units than +hp and +recruit time... level 4 techs should be powerful and worth going after - which is the basic problem with these units as you pointed out, they are simply not worth the expense/effort it takes to make them/buff them

I also think that the tier 1 fighter ships should have +damage against ornithopters... as it is, if you go against an ornithopter even with 3-4 tier 1 fighter ships it takes forever to kill it (you probably won't even kill it before it runs away... ornithopter is faster anyway). If they did, you could use those ships to screen your territory at least