What mechanoid would be the best for my combat squad?

[Hottox]

My squad of soldiers has a mechanitor with 22 bandwidth (still gonna go up) and no mechanoids under his control. What mechanoid would be best? I have 5 people and im specializing them all in different things, and i picked a mechanitor to be one of them as 5 people isn't enough to win some fights.

Resources are not an issue. I was thinking i'd make 1-2 paramedics to keep my hospital going both day and night even when doctors are sleeping or out on the battlefield, 2 fabricors to automate my advanced component production and then just load up on either centipedes or centurions. Thoughts?

[Sgt. Sarge]

The best mechanoid is a dead mechanoid

[Hykal]

Scythers are the most bang for your buck IMO, but you might want a Mining mech for the carry capacity.

[ichifish]

Just finished up an archonexus mostly-solo mechanitor run, so I tested out a lot of mechs. I didn't use a killbox, just melee-block and on-the map fighting. My mechanitor was a psycaster, so I relied on that a lot. For the first leg I got up to 40 bandwidth, 50 for the second, and 60 for the third. About mid-game in the first leg the mechanitor became a production specialist, so no cooking, animals, plants, mining, hauling, or cleaning. Mechs did everything but construction and crafting.

I found that the best were scythers, legionaries, lancers, tunnelers, and even militors. Having a single centurion for the shield wasn't bad, but all of the other big mechs are just too slow. Tunnelers are slow, too, but they tank almost as well as centipedes for lower costs and you can just park one where you need a blocker and leave it home when you're in the field.

Militors are wimpy, but they're dirt cheap and you can use them to swarm enemies and pull doomsdays. They cost less than a turret to make, are mobile, and don't blow up when they're smoked.

Scythers are great for tying up shooters and as melee blockers. Also cheap.

Lancers aren't bad, but watch out for friendly fire. Again, the best part is they're cheap.

Having 4-5 legionaries allows you to cycle them in and out before their shields break, although 200 points gets eaten up quick, so you need a bunch of them.

Centipedes are good tanks but the blasters and mini-gunners just tore up my walls and they were too slow for a lot of field work. Aside from taking forever to get across the map, they friendly-fire all the other units that need to get out ahead of them.

War queen is kind of situational. You can't control the minions, so they can end up in the way. You also can't direct their turret. I suppose the minions would be good for getting a big melee raid to bunch up, but I just melee-blocked those.

Didn't bother making a diabolus.

The centurion's 300 point mega shield is great, but they'll show up last to every fight that isn't coming in the front door and you can't direct their turret.

Lifters and fabricors are great, especially after you get the control upgrades. I used a paramedic for bionics operations and gene implants in the first two parts of the run (got all the bionics in part one, then all the genes in part two), but unless you're running a massive prison or doing a solo run they're pretty meh. My dog rescued more often than they did, and they don't seem to check for jobs very often, so even when the mechanitor had 7-8 medical I almost always did self-tend rather than have him bleed out for half a day until the paramedic got around to it. The one time it was helpful is when I had a bunch of refugees who all got the plague and were all sleeping in different buildings.

A couple of agrihands can take care of growing needs for a small colony but they do have a problem, a least in deserts where you have a lot of small, separate plots: they sow really slowly. Because they harvest before they sow and you can't force them to sow a whole plot like you can with a pawn, they waste a lot of time crossing the map. That is, if they're sowing a plot on one side of the map and something reaches 100% on the other side, they travel all the way across the map to harvest that. By the time they get back to initial plot, something else comes up for harvest, etc. This results in fields that get sown over the course of several days, exasperating the problem.

Constructoids aren't bad for taking care of repairs and working on big slow projects, like the ship, but by mid game your pawns will be a lot faster. I had two in the first colony, one in the second, and none in the third. One thing they were good for was repairing walls during fights (they also did a lot tanking early game). In the last colony I relied on zoning and lifters to deliver the resources for big construction projects, then sent the mechanitor in to do them. Lifters are great for corpse disposal as well.

Tunnelers are super useful for edge-of-map work. You can just park them out there and let them hum along. None of this walk-across-the-map-mine-a-single-chunk-walk-back-for-rec-without-hauling-it BS. Combined with a trio of lifters it's great. I don't use a lot of mods, but I got one that allows tunnelers to use deep-drills after my base got wrecked for the third time while I was on a world map mining expedition. It's seriously OP, though.

For reference I'm going to do the "journey to the ship" with the same mechanitor next, and with the 30 bandwidth limit I'm taking the following for the journey (no animals, and with the mechanitor as a production specialist):

5 legionaries
4 scythers
1 militor
2 tunnelers
2 lifters
1 agrihand
1 fabricor
1 cleansweeper