I disagree, although you have a point.

If siege frigs were much less costly (supply point wise), wiping out planets would be too easy. Fleets in Sins move very slowly. A stack of fifteen to twenty siege frigs supported by eight anti-strikecraft frigs could be used to wipe half of the enemy's worlds before they had a chance to react and there wouldn't be any good defense against it (hangar craft would be demolished by flaks, missile platforms can be passed). I usually build two or three to make them follow my second fleet and kill the planets they may come upon, while my caps are being more useful elsewhere.

Colony frigs. I say this unit is fine, at least for Vasari. I, for one, dislike going Space Egg first. Many people do, but I don't simply because I think that it is too fragile as your flagship, as it has no self defense abilities (although a high level Egg has the best "useful-to-useless ability ratio" among the Vasari caps). Going with any of the five cap ships first should be a viable tactic, and a colony frigate is necessary for the other four. I like to begin with a Marauder, a Carrier (it is not so bad after all, if you understand the repair cloud's real purpose ) or the Kortul (Volatile Nanites and weapon jammin' ftw). I need that colony frig there. It's fine, if not as useful and bound to be seen in numbers as LRM frigs are.

Overseer. Now, what do you hit first in a huge fight? Cap ships, right? Simply because one enemy cap's ability can cause mayhem among your fleet unlike any other ships'. Vasari have no way of defending their caps, other than those cap ships' own abilities. Well, Overseers will make your cap survive a lot longer. Five Overseers can mitigate damage taken from a really big fleet's focus fire for half a minute or more. One Overseer is taking 125dps off your ship (250 HPs every two secs)! So I say it is useful, even if not for its second ability, which in turn IS meh (it only pisses off Vasari players who wanted to use stabiliser nodes to quickly intercept you from the other end of the system, but end up in phase space for 2 minutes instead of one). To actually kill your caps the enemy will have to intercept your Overseers first. But he also has to kill your subverters which just turned off half of his fleet.
If suddenly everything in the enemy fleet becomes your top priority target, you're screwed. Again, Overseers aren't to be used in spams, but they're cheap by themselves and are your only way of making your caps live longer, way longer. They are useful, although I typically experimented with returning armada recently and never had a supply point to spend on any ship, Overseers included.

Honestly I wouldn't mind siege frigates going back to the way they were long ago with low supply costs.  If competitive online players can state why that would be a problem, go for it, but as for me who mostly plays offline, I really don't see it as a problem.

We went from a small minority whining that siege frigates were wiping them out to a place where they simply aren't built by me and I'd wager not built as much by the online folks.  Is there any real concern for cheap strategies that will wipe out other players with them?  If so, please explain.

In addition, I wouldn't mind seeing them back reasonably priced again because Entrenchment sounds like it will easily dispose of them if sent into a system by themselves.

Yep, Siege Frigs are a bit expensive now.  I personally almost never build them, but every now and then they are handy when you want to kill some worlds but don't want to commit a capital away from the front line.  The problem back in the days of low supply cost was people would make suicide planet gank fleets of siege frigs and fly them around and kill all your worlds faster than you could blow up the frigates.

Overseers are actually pretty handy, but I agree, they are almost always last on my list of ships to unlock and you kind of get used to playing without them since their influence is kind of subtle.  I have noticed just having a handful of them in your fleet is very helpful.

Seige frigates could use a little tweaking.  I don't think making them cheaper is the answer.  Maybe they could be given a secondary role?  If made cheaper, they should definately be made softer so standard planet defenses could handle them before they were able to wipe out a whole bunch of worlds.  Thoughts?

I personally think that the siege frigates should be made better bombers or perhaps give them an ability that deals heavy damage to tactical structures. Other than that though, it's hard to say that any of the units are useless. I always use colony frigates as any race.

As drastic as this is, I find myself agreeing.  Capitals would gain the boon of becoming more important as well and their planet damage could always be raised to compensate.

Keep seige frigates...

Some of only build one (or sometime a few) caps per fleet and get them up to Lvl10 (rather then 10 ships at lvls 4-7). So the seige frigates are great for knocking down a enemy planet.

If you don't like them - don't build them!!!

Its pretty stupid for me not to have thought of protecting capships with Overseers already. Oh well. Cataclysm2000, the Skirantra Carrier's repair cloud is very useful. It helps keep strikecraft alive as well as focus-fired ships.

I've found that turning off auto attack for the overseers helps a fair bit - and I don't bother researching the other stuff.  If they have *nothing* else to do except hang around the back of the fleet and throw armour at damaged ships I see a nice jump in ships that survive tough fights, cap ships in particular without any micro.  Far more than enough to offset the loss of their laughable attack power.

The reason the frigates weren't used is because they started with 0 antimatter.  Plus, the Akkan's weapon range extension is far from useless.

There are a few things I'd like to add to this discussion as well.

1) Siege Frigates - Build 5 and keep them in hiding until the enemy engages your fleet. Then send them off on a little reconassiance to a different planet 1 or 2 jump behind the fight. The enemy fleet will have a few options:

• Flee the fight to defend sieged planet
• Activate a reserve fleet
• Lose a planet that wasn't part of their plan.

Now of course you can argue a lot of other things - but the suprise of having a planet under siege especially 1 or 2 jumps from the main fight deeper in his territory more often than not will distract him or her long enough to make a mistake. If they try to flee to defend the other planet, they aren't shooting. If they activate a reserve fleet the cats out of the bag and you might want to consider retreating before you lose the bulk of your fleet, and third they lost a plnaet that suddently give sthem no defensive bonus and you can keep pushing deeper knowing that their fleet is still tied up.

2) Colony Ships

I generalyl play vasari now, I started with TEC but didn't like the style. I never build the Jarrasul first because the Kortul is in my opinion better. I usually end up with 2-3 colony frigates to do the dirty work - yes it takes longer but early on i need to kill ships not colonize planets. Once I've got a stable section of space I usualyl decommision 2 of them and use caps instead. Unlike the other races there are bonuses for decommisioning things so I am not afraid to get rid of things that have served their purpose but are takign up space now. Same with tructures. If a planet is no longer on the edge of space, I don't need 3 frigate factories there, especially with phase gates. I'd rather throw up some labs or trade ports.

3) I don't build the Oversers until late game where there are some huge fleets flying around. But with micromanaging as others haev stated, you can pretty much make your caps last 2-3x longer than without them. Between Overseers and the Marauders Phase Out Hull I can usually trick a player to sending everythign they have at 1 cap ship and then phase out and then repair all the damage which really pisses them off and almost always costs them 5% of their fleet. While they wasted all their firepower on a phased out and repaired ship, my fleet toook out repair ships and frigates.

I don't build a lot of strike craft mostly because with phae out I find that they can be mitigated very quickly. If they attack a target thats invulnerable their DPS is wasted and teh flaks get free kills.

If you plan on nothing, the Egg is a good choice. Grants mildly faster expansion and has a moderate effect on any fight you enter. Its drawback is a lack of survivability boosters and vulnerability (weakest cap of all, smallest HP and SP progression and weak armor), as well as any anti-mass abilities.

If you plan on being aggressive or the map is big, Kortul is fine. Will clear surrounding planets of neutrals much faster than Jarrasul, making up for its lack of Colonize ability. It also much tougher and is an extremely adaptable ship - it can counter carrier spammers by maxing Jam Weapons, it can counter LRM spams with Volatile Nanites. With Surge and Disruptive Strikes it can well fight any other cap ship by reducing it to a tough antimatterless frigate in seconds.

If the map is small and you are a berserker, the Vulkoras is very good. At level 4 it becomes a planet killer with 2/3 Assault Spec (with the bug fixed it rocks ass), while 2/3 PMS can keep small enemy groups at bay with some support. He is best if you plan on rushing the enemy's economy by quickly disabling his asteroids and/or orbital structures, which Vulk excels at. It really is just another well viable strategy.

Only the Skirantra and the Marauder seem to me that they aren't as good for the beginning, although Skirantra is almost the obvious choice if you go into carriers, while Marauder at level 5 is capable of keeping an enemy cap phased out for two minutes straight, giving you a crapload of time to eliminate the rest of his fleet.

I didn't say it was a guarantee, but a lot of times you can get lucky and at least distract them long enough to make a mistake that costs them the fleet or force them to retreat. At the expense of a few ships I'll take that risk, especially if its a choke point.