Crew TP is no joke if you don't mind the added micromanagement. I showed off the plays it has with hacking, but vs most ships after initial combats the AI will pull its pilot to fight you (don't board in piloting) which tanks evasion. You can also cause this effect by simply moving between rooms in the ship...for whatever reason even ships with 5 crew will shuffle the pilot out and give a window of low evade, which makes it a lot easier to shoot out weapons, medbay, or clone bay. Most importantly though it gives you a means of somewhat quickly winning encounters even in runs where weaponry is scarce. My kestrel A run was more awkward since I had TP/MC/drones...IMO the weakest 3 system combo and only functional there because flak/bl2/pike/artemis is plenty to suppress weapons with a pulled or MC'd pilot.
Mantis C is "awkward" early but actually pretty strong, depending on how you control it. Along with slug B it's the most micro-intensive early game ship in the game, since you will get considerably different early game mileage depending on how well you time bombs with how your crew moves between rooms. Controlled optimally, its only bad earlygame matchup are ships with zoltan shields (needs 3 bombs to get through and takes a while)...scouts aren't a problem for it and early medbay/clonebay can be handled by the bomb/boarding combo easily enough.
Compare this to other ships though; it's not completely shut down by a stray hit to weapons, gets crew kill scrap rewards, has only one bad matchup, needs very little scrap to have decent defenses and before the first jump carries an offense that continues to be viable going into sectors 3-4 without needing to pick much up in the way of weapons. You could pick up a random ion weapon or zoltan bypass (for super shields) and carry that + starting weapons into end game with few system purchases, winning comfortably. The micro is certainly harder than most ships but the general lack of heavy weaknesses coupled with *guaranteed* scaling (and strong scaling at that) make a good case for this being a high tier ship.
I don't share the common dislike of 2 man TPs, but the 4 man version is still obviously better.
Mantis C is "awkward" early but actually pretty strong, depending on how you control it. Along with slug B it's the most micro-intensive early game ship in the game, since you will get considerably different early game mileage depending on how well you time bombs with how your crew moves between rooms. Controlled optimally, its only bad earlygame matchup are ships with zoltan shields (needs 3 bombs to get through and takes a while)...scouts aren't a problem for it and early medbay/clonebay can be handled by the bomb/boarding combo easily enough.
Compare this to other ships though; it's not completely shut down by a stray hit to weapons, gets crew kill scrap rewards, has only one bad matchup, needs very little scrap to have decent defenses and before the first jump carries an offense that continues to be viable going into sectors 3-4 without needing to pick much up in the way of weapons. You could pick up a random ion weapon or zoltan bypass (for super shields) and carry that + starting weapons into end game with few system purchases, winning comfortably. The micro is certainly harder than most ships but the general lack of heavy weaknesses coupled with *guaranteed* scaling (and strong scaling at that) make a good case for this being a high tier ship.
I don't share the common dislike of 2 man TPs, but the 4 man version is still obviously better.