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[Tarran]

Spire Frigates are great, if a bit generic, fleetball ships, which can mount infinite range railguns and shields and are fairly tough. Blade spawners are amazing if you can stay a distance from the enemy. Parasites are nice for stealing from the AI (though you can buy mercenary versions). Snipers are snipers, and have infinite range. And... that's basically all I can think of. I'm not too well-versed in the specific merits of all the ship types.

[Aklyon]

I've heard the Protector Starships can be superb, but I haven't used them. They're one of the modular ships, but this time with defensive bits instead of engine-killing bits the riot starships use or the general offensive bits the spire bonus starships use.

Neinzul Railpods are fun to use if you've got a growing econ, with loop-build MSDs you can essentially convert metal into sniper damage with them, higher marks do increased damage. Higher marks might be a bit riskier now with salvage, but they don't cost much in the first place and don't have a time-limited life like most neinzul units. (They kill themselves after a few shots instead)

I know I've used more (like railclusters), but not enough to really describe them well.

[Frumple]

Autobombs are gloriously wonderful -- build (a half dozen) space port thingies right outside a wormhole and spew exploding death into it (or set the waypoint to several sectors out and wipe clean a whole swath of the galaxy), or bring in the mobile builder thingies. It'll strip entire systems of everything but the guard posts without your actual fleet having to budge. (Maws are actually pretty great -- full pop can functionally erase huge swaths of smaller stuff, and still soak up a nice chunk of damage for your own doodlings.

Any of the neinzul stuff -- except, perhaps, the shrikes -- are absolutely amazing in practice. Railpods are obvious, but I'm particularly fond of the weasels (ridiculously tanky for their cost), fireflies, and... one of the other ones I'm forgetting the name of. It's like fireflies, but one of the two makes things explode and the other does percentile damage. Both great. And the... whatever they are. The reclaiming suiciders. They're great -- spam them everywhere, never build a fleet ship beyond 'em, still get full cap everything.

Tackle drone launchers are absolutely beautiful. Complete neutering of almost every non-starship with just a handful. Full pop of them can hold off several hundred little dudes easily, if they're not immune to tractors.

Really, almost every single bonus ship -- barring the boring stuff like MRLSes, or the non-suicide really low HP stuff (and sometimes even then -- the autocannons or whatever they are are actually superbly brutal if you can keep their numbers up [and that's what mobile docks are for].) -- is objectively wonderful, to the extent it's not really a question of "better" or "worse" but rather "What do I feel like shoving up the AI's electrocloaca today?"

[Aklyon]

Neinzul reclaimers are nanoswarms. Neinzul in general work gloriously with a full set of MSDs. If you've got enough neinzul types and metal (well, really anything and enough metal, but swarmers like autobombs and neinzul build fastest and thus work the best if you aren't supporting the MSDs with much else), you could set them all up in your MSDs, send them through a wormhole, turn on the msds and set them to attack-move or FRD, and watch as basically an entire fleet appears out of nowhere.

Enclave Starship
Pulse interval from 10/9/8/7 seconds => 5 seconds.
It now only spawns drones of the enclaves's own mark level (so the mkIV gets 8 mkIV drones per pulse, not a total of 32 mkI/II/III/IV drones).

Aw, that was hilarious.

Edit again for interest:

More Salvage Revisions

    The salvage-reprisal waves now:
        Are decoupled from normal waves.
            So it doesn't impact the timing of those normal waves at all anymore; previously they kind of hijacked the whole normal-wave mechanic if you stayed on the offensive.
        Aren't "full set of normal waves + salvage strength" anymore, instead it's just the salvage strength (plus the normal freebie starship(s) but NOT any AI-specific freebies like Spire Hammer capital ships).
        Only launch when that AI player has enough salvage strength to at least equal a normal wave.
        Thanks to LintMan, Toranth, and TechSY730 for inspiring this change.

    Removed the rule where an AI player had to wait 10 minutes after announcing a reprisal wave before announcing another (there's still an effective minimum interval of 3 minutes due to another rule).
        Now that they don't include full sets of normal waves the delay is less important, and indeed could lead to much-larger-than-anticipated salvage-reprisal waves due to having more time in which to accumulate casualties.

    The AI's effective salvage is now multiplied by Min(1,(current_game_time/2_hours)).
        So At 12 minutes into the game, its salvage only counts for 10% of its full value.
        But at 60 minutes into the game, that salvage will be up to 50% of its full value.
        And at 2 hours onward it's just full value (before the difficulty-based multiplier).
        The overall effect is to prevent the mechanic from requiring an inordinate amount of early-game defenses just to deal with the fallout from early-game casualties.

[GiglameshDespair]

What's this about ship salvage? I've never seen ships leave behind remains.

[Aklyon]

What's this about ship salvage? I've never seen ships leave behind remains.

They still don't.Its invisible salvage that show up if you hover over your metal income, assuming you have a recent beta patch.

[Tarran]

I like how everyone else but Gig ignored my questions for whatever reason. I am disappoint, all.

[Frumple]

... I wasn't sure which weekend was next weekend (29th or 5th?), so was abstaining until something along the lines of a time was mentioned

Because I couldn't say without knowing that. And then a question I could provide response to came up, ha. But probably could, m'self. Just don't actually know.

[GiglameshDespair]

so was abstaining until something along the lines of a time was mentioned

From 8pm GMT?

[Frumple]

... I wasn't sure which weekend was next weekend (29th or 5th?)

[Aklyon]

The answer here is either Tarran is not specific enough, or Frumple failed a perception check.

[Tarran]

Personally I'm thinking more of a failed Effort check on Frumple's part.

Also, Aklyon, don't think I haven't noticed that you haven't responded either.



Anyway, for those who still think I give a crud about what gets played 2 weeks from now, I meant this weekend.

[Aklyon]

Well, generally I'm good with whatever reasonable EST time on the weekend, unless stuff is happening.

[Frumple]

The answer here is either Tarran is not specific enough, or Frumple failed a perception check.

Hrng. It's more that "next weekend" is... very unspecific, where I'm at. You say next weekend on a thursday/friday, it can either mean the coming weekend (i.e., 1-2 days later -- "this coming weekend" or just "this weekend" is, in fact, what is generally used) or the weekend after, and more often the latter than the former.

But yeah, I could probably manage to show up this weekend. Next one, I may or may not be able to show on saturday, but sunday'd be free.

[Tarran]

Thing is, I didn't post on Thursday or Friday, I posted at the break of Wednesday. And it was Wednesday by only by 1 hour. The closest "Weekend" from when I posted it was the weekend before.