Are shuttles useful after the early game?

[ceoln]

Shuttles are good starting ships because they're balanced and cheap. But after that, is there a reason to have a shuttle, given the tiny six-ship limit? I was thinking of having one shuttle, one fighter, one explorer, one hauler, one favorite exotic, and then one free slot, and just upgrade the four normal ones as I ran across better ships, and use the one open slot for anything irresistible; but now I'm questioning whether there's a reason to have a non-S shuttle in there at all. I never seem to fly my current A-class Shuttle; there isn't really a reason to, and it'd be nice to have two open slots for lucky finds. Am I overlooking anything, or is it just a matter of aesthetic taste or whatever?

[Orion Invictus]

Nope. Neither are haulers, since you can now just buy more slots for the other ships.

[ceoln]

Hm, interesting point! Aren't haulters cheaper per slot when you first buy them, though? That is, isn't it cheaper to buy a hauler that starts with 40 slots, than to upgrade a fighter that much? (Can you even upgrade a fighter that much?)

[DarkEternal]

Yes, they are. I keep a basic, bare bones, no add-on tech Shuttle in my freighter bay for black hole jumping. Black holes fry your add-on tech. So yes, they are VERY useful, despite what Orion claims.

[DarkEternal]

Originally posted by ceoln:

Hm, interesting point! Aren't haulters cheaper per slot when you first buy them, though? That is, isn't it cheaper to buy a hauler that starts with 40 slots, than to upgrade a fighter that much? (Can you even upgrade a fighter that much?)

Yes and yes. You can go all the way to 48 slots with a fighter, but that last slot will cost you 300 million units. Not to mention the cost of every slot before it since it's an incremental increase every time you purchase a new slot. Lots of units. Over a billion. At least for my part since I boosted a smaller fighter.

[ceoln]

Oh, clever! :) I don't jump black holes much at the moment, so that might not be worth a whole ship-slot, to me, but still a great thought.

[DarkEternal]

Originally posted by ceoln:

Oh, clever! :) I don't jump black holes much at the moment, so that might not be worth a whole ship-slot, to me, but still a great thought.

It's the cheapest solution to black holing since shuttles are the cheapest ships in the game. You don't even need a fancy one. Just a junker C class will suffice for black holing. And it beats repairing tech every time you jump through one. And trust me, unless you wanna make 200+ jumps chasing down that perfect planet for a base or heading towards the center, you're gonna wanna take advantage of the Black Hole Highway, for lack of a better term, that players have been mapping for a long time.

[FoolishOwl]

It's mostly aesthetics. I think shuttles have the most efficient landing systems, but, with the upgrades to the landing systems available on all ships, that really doesn't matter.

But, at least if you're playing in normal mode, this is a pretty casual game. You really have to go looking for a challenge. You can complete most of the storyline missions in any ship.

As I've seen in other relatively casual games, people optimize, not because they need to, to meet challenges in the game, but because optimization is in itself a sort of game.

I've wanted to do a one-of-each collection, though I'm holding back because I want to keep at least one slot free for ships to acquire and scrap.

[Orion Invictus]

Originally posted by ceoln:

Hm, interesting point! Aren't haulters cheaper per slot when you first buy them, though? That is, isn't it cheaper to buy a hauler that starts with 40 slots, than to upgrade a fighter that much? (Can you even upgrade a fighter that much?)

Well, yeah, but I thought you wanted end-game advice. End-game, you're better off just getting slots.

PS: There's storage augmentation units you can use instead of units. While rare, they allow you to increase slots without paying.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

IMO, the exotics are the best "end-game" ships because they have the top warp distance and pretty good on all the other areas. That said, it is purely aesthetics to a great degree since any ship you like can be maxed out. The types have various strengths but the game can be played with any C class ship...so once you get past that-the strengths are a minor feature.

Unless you are planning to cruise the galaxy a lot, the differences in warp distance are not a huge deal. Plus, you can use black holes to get around pretty quickly regardless of the ship type you pick.

[ceoln]

Yeah, I'm probably sort of mid-game. And I play really slowly in terms of advancement, because I love just tooling around randomly on a nice world in the Roamer, like admiring the sunset and stuff. :D I've got like 120 hrs on this current save, and I've just passed 100M units for the first time. So any and all advice is welcome :) thanks for yours.

(I've gotten like three augmentation things from frigate missions recently; very nice!)

[Ygolnac]

Per se shuttles are useless, as it is any non-exotic ship. Maybe having a free slot to buy the cheapest junk that lands on the station before going black hole is something good, especially now that you can scrap it on the other side.

All of this beeing said, in this game being min-maxed is even more useless than shuttles, becouse a bunch a good shields can tank everything and a phase beam can make reason of everything. And multi ship call in, freighter tele-magic, exo etc made having big inventory space useless (by fortune).

So you can fly everything that fancy your aestethics without loosing much.