(January 19th, 2015, 17:53)Fenn Wrote: At least Stealth B starts with cloaking. Stealth C doesn't have cloaking or shields subsystems - it has to rely on a single Shield Charger drone to build defences. As you can imagine this fails to suffice against 99% of enemy ships you'll encounter in Hard Mode, and makes asteroid fields a death sentence. Its only redeeming feature is that it starts with Long-Range Scanners so it can avoid all the ships which will grind it into a fine powder.
Zoltan C might be more frustrating to play (and it definitely sounds like micromanagement hell) but I can't think of a ship more terrible than Stealth C.
I disagree on the count of Stealth C. The shield overcharger doesn't seem like much, but it can get up one bar of shielding before 90% of weapons can fire, which means that the average enemy ship (two lasers or 1 missile 1 laser) will only get one shot through, about the same as if you started with regular shields. Having the anti drone also helps a lot.
But the biggest difference is that your weapons take ~12 seconds to charge instead of 23. That makes a *massive* difference.