About the ships in vanilla game.

[Equalizer]

My feeling is that TEL ships are the most suitable, except the Colossus ARG, the Gorgons PAR, and the Odysseus PAR which seem to be better.

What do you think?

[conrado.lacerda]

Suitable for what?

[Equalizer]

To survive in this world...

[conrado.lacerda]

They sturdy and well-shielded, true, but also tend to be slower and less armed, so you need to bring more of them to a fight.

[Equalizer]

I find that the speed difference is not that big and in any case in combat all ships are slow. Then what matters to me are the power of shields and weapons. I think everyone will agree that a destroyed ship no longer opens fire, unless it is a ghost, so I tell myself that in the end only shields count... but that's my opinion and I would like to have other opinions if possible with concrete examples of ships, I may have missed something important^^

[DrunkenOrca]

depends... if you a personally a perfect pilot - better fast and powerful. For AI - better shields. Also depends on size of fleet and what it should do.

[Killzad]

TER ships are even more sturdy and with more guns for example the SYN and the Asgard are un matched on that if speed is none issue for you. And the Boron carrier too. But if you prefer speed i would go with Split more speed more guns but less shields and the Erlking battleships faster than destroyers and the best player ship in the game when upgraded.

In general Split are speed and fast tracking on turrents, TER bigger shield pools easy economy. PAR have the longer range on weapons. TEL have more efficient civilian ships. Boron live on there own universe. xD

[conrado.lacerda]

Well, this game doesn't have MP, so there isn't really a meta to discuss...

[Doom]

Originally posted by François:

To survive in this world...

You can survive in any ship. Like you can buzz through xenon sectors in Argon Discoverer without a scratch.

DLCs add couple of "clearly better" ships.

For example, Yaki Moreya, Terran Katana, Split Cobra, Split Chimera, Boron Irukanji, Boron Guppy, Terran Osaka, Terran Syn, Terran Asgard, Split Rattlesnake, Split Raptor. Though in case of split there's tradeoffs.

Then there's mixing the equipment, like Split Combat Engines.

Originally posted by François:

I find that the speed difference is not that big and in any case in combat all ships are slow

That's because you only have base game which is missing fastest ships.

Basically, you can have ship flying at 500 m/s without trying hard. If you try hard, you can boost it to 800-1000 m/s with installable modifications. You know, the ones Boso Ta researched.

[RaptorSolutions]

Phoenixes also has it's engines in hard to hit places, so that helps a lot if your enemy has a lot of fighters.

[Cellar_Cat]

Generally speaking I find that in AI control, the ships that survive have the highest base speeds (S and M) and the most shields (L+). You might expect more shields would always make the most difference, but without constant regen there is no such thing as tanking damage. Your shields and hull are only delaying death for a short while as you try to get away from damage—and the AI is not smart about this. Their best chance to avoid damage is just making them faster at everything they might be doing, so they evade by accident.

Once you get up to L though there is no evasion in AI hands, so it's all shields.

[mikemonger]

It's been a while since I've played, but unless something's changed drastically TEL ships are generally the least useful.

TEL shields, on the other hand, are pretty sweet. ARG L miners with TEL shields never die, because they have the best fire arcs with flak turrets so they just annihilate Kha'ak.

[Equalizer]

On both of my games, TEL faction quickly wipes out XEN faction... I don't believe in chance.

[RaptorSolutions]

TEL is an economic superpower. They are at peace with everyone else and their sectors are close to each other with access to a lot of resources.
That combined with their shipbuilding basically being focused in only one location means their warships have basically only one place to push to. Which for me is generally the XEN sector North of Ianamus Zura.
Also unlike other factions MIN and TEL more or less work together, so they basically have 2 entire fleets. Compared to the others where they are either at war with each other or one of them do not even have military fleets. ARG and ANT do not actually work together so to speak. You'll rarely if ever see ARG fleets in Second Checkpoint or Frontier's Edge for instance.

[Equalizer]

This is true except for one detail which is that there are two XEN houses: one in the northeast and another in the southeast. And the TELs sow death and devastation in both places at the same time while ARG and PAR have trouble managing a single XEN house. Although PAR defends itself well unlike ARG.