Sins of A Solar Empire - Gameplay - Units

Units

There are five main categories of ships in the game: strike craft, frigates, cruisers, capital ships and non-combat ships.

The strike craft is the smallest ship in the game, similar in behaviour and appearance to the stereotypical "starfighter". They can only be controlled in squadrons and are built in hangars, carriers and capital ships for no fee, with the casualties automatically replaced. There are two types of strike craft: fighters, which come in squadrons of four-nine crafts, and bombers in squads of three-seven. Fighters are primarily for fending off enemy fighters, bombers and lightly armored ships, while the objective of the bomber is to attack heavily armored enemy ships and structures. Each race is capable of producing strike craft, though not all races are equally powerful in this field.

Frigates are the smallest warship that the player can build individually and represent the bulk of most fleets; there is a reconnaissance vessel, a front line combat frigate, a long range attacker, an anti-strikecraft defense ship, a siege craft and a colony ship for each faction with subtle differences. Reconnaissance ships scout the solar systems for colonizable planets, provide advance warnings for incoming enemy fleets and can be upgraded to carry out other activities. Front line frigates form the mainstay combatants of fleets, and gain abilities to interfere with support ships' abilities. Long-range frigates eliminate swarms of front line frigates. Defense ships provide protection against strike craft, while siege crafts bomb planets. Colony ships are used to colonize new planets, and capture neutral resource extractors.

Cruisers are specialized ships and mostly play a support role in fleets. Carriers are unarmed but deploy 2-3 squadrons of strikecraft; offensive support cruisers improve attack of friendly ships and diminish those of enemies; defensive support cruisers increase survivability of friendly vessels and decrease those of enemies; and the heavy cruisers are powerful close-range combatants. Cruisers are in many ways treated as larger, more expensive frigates, e.g. produced in Frigate Factories.

Capital ships are high-value vessels and the cornerstones of fleets, and they have the ability to accumulate experience and "level up" in combat. A capital ship can also be made to “level up” by training the crew of that particular vessel, although this requires spending of credits and is not possible beyond Level 3, or, with the "Basic Crew Training" upgrade available to all races, Level 4. An increase in a capital ship's level gives it improvements in its offensive and defensive systems and unlocks special abilities. It periodically adds more strike craft slots for the capital ship. All capital ships carry strike craft, though in different numbers: long range attackers (dreadnoughts) gain their only squad at Level 5 of 10, while a Level 10 Halcyon-class carrier has up to 12. There are five (six with Rebellion) general classes of capital ships, all available from start: battleships, carriers, colony ships, long range attack ships, and two classes of support vessels. The player's first capital ship is free. Others require a large amount of resources to build, equal for all classes, and all occupy 50 Fleet Supply and 1 Capital Ship Crew. When a capital ship is in the gravity well of a planet it slows or even stops the spread of enemy culture going to that planet. Each unit has its own abilities that can be passive or active and can affect its fleet or the enemy fleet; initially a capital ship has no special abilities, but with each level the player can unlock or upgrade one of three abilities, and a highly powerful fourth is unlocked at Level 6. Before Rebellion, standard abilities had 3 upgrade levels, and the ultimate ability could not be upgraded; as a result, a Level 10 ship would have all of them unlocked; the expansion allows a fourth upgrade for each of the standard abilities and an upgrade for the "ultimate" abilities, without increasing the level cap.

Non-combat ships are unarmed and unarmored, therefore making them prime targets for enemies, particularly pirate fleets. Non-combat vessels are basically the workers of the empire. They include construction ships, which build orbiting structures around a planet, and, in Rebellion, tear down enemy structures; trade ships, which travel to and from trade ports of different planets to raise credit; and refinery ships which travel between refineries and extractors to boost resource stockpiling. All of them are spawned for free; save for construction ships, they are not player-controllable, whereas construction ships are incapable of interplanetary travel.