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[Light forger]

For those who don't know S.P.A.Z(space pirates and zombies) is a space shooter where you get ships and try raise large amounts of data, cash, and men to fight with. The website is here: http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/ . Any way the first order of this let's play is how are we going to tech:

Lasers or Cannons:
Lasers fire in a normally fairly short strait line and deal high damage to cloaks and shields/Cannons normally deal high damage in a long range and are powerful against armor but smaller ships can be a huge issues. Note: there are some lasers and cannons that aren't like this but they are late game.
Shields or Cloaks:
Shields can take more damage and offer no negatives fairly strait foreword/Cloaks slow you down and take less damage but you deal more damage, late game they offer no negatives and have the damage boost.
Armor/Hull:
Armor takes more damage but slows you down/Hull takes less damage but doesn't slow you down and you can have more crew.

Extras: pick as many as you like.:
Subsystems: all round tech offers many small boosts let's you mount point defenses.
Engine*:speeds you up what did you think it did?
Reactors*: gives you more power so you can fire your weapons more.
Drones: deals good damage and very useful but only comes around mid-game.
Turrets*:Makes your turrets faster and lets you drop some deployable ones.
Crew:Boosts your crew has a few fun but wasteful weapons.
Mines:Gives you mines good with cloaked ships.
Bomb:A heavy duty weapon with hyper damage very nasty but can hurt our own ships.
Launchers:Missile and torpedo type weapons many ships have them.

Everything with a * by it we will need to put a few points into it to be able to really fight with anything.

Let the voting begin!

[Xanatos Jr.]

Cannons, shields, armor and hull, reactor, engine.

[Frumple]

Launchers, launchers, launchers, more launchers, macross missile massacre, maybe drones. Utility junk: shields, reactors, engines, armor, in that order. Hull's fairly ignorable, from what I've seen. I'd probably go with mines over bombs or turrets; they seem to be really good at taking down stations, compared to a lot of other stuff. Missiles will out range stations in fairly short order, though. Haven't used bombs much -- the biggest thing I've noticed about them is they generally do almost nothing to me I'd love to see more done with the suicide cannon/grunt shuttle (haven't gotten the latter, yet), as I haven't seen the blueprint/data theft stuff happen yet.

If I had to choose between cannon and beams, I'd go with beams; they tend to be better at knocking shields down, which regen a lot faster than armor/hull. Also better at mining and junk, from what I've seen. EDIT: The best drones use cannons. Cannons is what you want Launchers primary, cannons secondary, drones tertiary. Then either mines or bombs for station dropping, I guess.

[Boksi]

Seconding Frumple's choice of weapons. Missiles are fun.

[Darkmere]

Gonna go with beams, shields, launchers, subsystems enough to get point defense, and mines. Mainly because in my game I went with all the other things, and I'm curious.

[Xanatos Jr.]

Missiles are fine, I guess.

[Frumple]

They're pretty great. I just got ahold of the Flora in th'game I'm playing. Slapped two large launcher boosters and four tech 8 (current max) small missiles on that baby, it's spitting out more missiles than a five missile/one booster Volley. And has drones. Dropped an outpost in about 15-20 seconds from ~2750

Between that, said 5/1 Volley, and my small ranger (Two missiles!), it's like a stream of fiery death flowing from the loins of my ship formation. Blowing up everything from over a screen away. Anything smaller than volley sized critters (and even some of them) just disintegrate <3

It's just great to destroy grasshoppers and crap with a single round of fire from 3k out

[Orb]

I honestly prefer cannons. Higher DPS than all three weapon types, especially with research. Armour is the hardest layer to get through, and repairs slowly, if at all. Cannons typically have a longer range than beams also.

I played SPAZ on a harder difficulty level though, so that might have biased my opinion a little(Dang Colony Space Stations repairing faster than I can kill).

My typical fleet formation, once I got to heavy ships, was 1 capital ship(such as a right hook), and 2 of the lightest combat ship. The ships are cloaked and armed with beam weapons to complement my cannon weapons.

Honestly, specializing in just ONE weapon tech isn't useful, since each weapon has its advantages. In my fleet compositions, I often have shield and cloak, with lasers and cannon, and perhaps a torpedo launcher.

This is thinking late game though. Early game it doesn't matter much what you slap on it.

[Anvilfolk]

So, boosters actually do stuff? Never used them...

[forsaken1111]

So, boosters actually do stuff? Never used them...

Boosters are the best thing ever. A few shield boosters can make the difference in a fight.

[Frumple]

That Flora I mentioned? Its four small missile launchers, boosted by a pair of large launcher boosters, was hitting only just shy of the two med launcher, three small launcher, 1 booster Volley I had. And firing faster.

From what I could eyeball, it was shooting the damage of those small missiles up to around large (i.e. two damage tiers) missile range. That being per missile, mind. Reload was dropped low enough there was never more than a two second pause between me firing something. It's pretty ruddy awesome.

I do wish I could see more concrete numbers on what boosters do, though. Would make optimizing things easier

The other thing I actually checked the numbers on... two small shield boosters were putting a Big Brother up, iirc, about 60 points of shield. A single medium booster, slightly less. So, two next-size-down boosters does more than a single booster of the next size. That's a good thing to know once you've got double and triple mounts, and can afford to dump a small turret weapon to boost something else.

Grinder with a double booster instead of that tiny turreted weapon, boosting up the huge primary gun? Hilarious amounts of damage, plus incredible range. Even with just a single booster, I had that basic beam weapon hitting stuff around the 1k range with only tech 4 beams

[Darkmere]

I never even thought of using a dual-turret to mount boosters. That's genius. Bravo, sir!

[Frumple]

Similarly, if you've got a turret mount too small to support doubling or tripling that you intend to use for a booster, it's entirely in your interest to slap a fixed mount on it, since those things don't need to move around. No downside except the (trivial) cost.

[Light forger]

I seems we are going with cannons/armor/launchers/drones with some crew and subsystems however should we use shields or cloaking?
At Orb: don't forget we can energy burst cannon and particle cannon for shields.

[Orb]

I seems we are going with cannons/armor/launchers/drones with some crew and subsystems however should we use shields or cloaking?
At Orb: don't forget we can energy burst cannon and particle cannon for shields.

Huh. I thought the energy burst cannon was a laser weapon.

But yes. Particle cannons are amazing, and can rip through zombies and enemy ships alike.