Power surge is a basic attack and shield buff.

Disruptive strikes has a chance of destroying antimatter already in the reserves of the enemy ship(passive).

Subverter cruiser ability only works on frigates and cruisers.

Micro phasing aura makes fighter/bombers make micro jumps in system there by avoiding being shot down(passive).

And the rest I don't feel like answering.


P.S. Try READING the info cards they explain things well enough.

Power surge - Read the effect bar. It's good.
Jam Weapons - Not a bad ability if only against carrier-heavy fleets.
Disruptive strikes - Read the ability. Combines nicely with power surge. More hits on enemy ships = longber cooldown and less antimatter.
Volitile Nanites - Good ability. Takes out capital ships right quick with combined fire.

Repair cloud - Don't know if it stacks, but it's a nice ability.
Scramble bombers - I believe it's X extra bombers, where X=the level of this ability.
Microphasing Aura - The specifics are a little unknown, but the higher the level, the more often fighters tend to "phase out" at just the right time. It's a real winner in a carrier-heavy fleet, as it effects all fighters within its decent-sized radius.
Replicate forces - You get a free duplicate frigate or cruiser, basically. I'm not exactly sold on it, but it's a good way to get more support cruisers in the middle of a fight (the AI tends to target them first).

Colonize - decreases build time. Can be really good depending on the situation.
Gravity Warhead - Single target, but it's extremely effective against individual capital ships or pivotal cruisers - trap 'em and stick 'em, basically.
Nano-Dissasembler - Combined with gravity warhead, you can really screw over a specific ship with this.
Drain Planet - It's good. You manage to hit a planet for a lot of damage and get a lot of resources. What's not to like?

Phase out hull - This is a good support ability. At level 3, you can keep 5 ships phased out at once. The best time to use this ability is in the early fight, when you couldn't possibly be shooting at all the ships your enemy has. Effectively keep them out of the fight for a while (when you wouldn't have been targetting them anyways) and then turn the ability off and mop them up later.
Distort Gravity - As you noted, it's a very good ability. Great for catching up to slowed-down ships.
Subversion - It's like a really crappy Embargo. I never much cared for this ability.
Stabalize Phase space - Great in the late-game for obvious reasons.

Phase Missle Swarm - Absolutely amazing ability, dealing lots of damage to everything within range. The range is short, though, so don't set it to auto-cast. You've got to position the Desolator just right for this, but it can be critical. I like to use Desolators as my first capital ships for this ability alone.
Deploy Siege Platform - Relatively poor ability. It's okay later on to supplement the assault specialization, but it's no good in the earlier game.
Assult Spec - It's quite good past level one, and at level 3, it's pretty deadly. Good in the mid to late game when you're assaulting enemy planets rather than colonizing neutral ones.
Disintegration - A constant stream of damage. It does 200 damage/second for several seconds, which is absolutely insane when the ship in question is having its shields lowered and is under the effect of volatile nanites and a nano-disassembler. It can easily knock out a capital ship's shields all on its own, or bring a capital ship from "wounded, but all right" straight to dead.

Other abilities:
Subverters are absolutely amazing. I always feature a good number of them in my fleets. The shield lowering ability is great no matter what the weapons you're using, but it's extra good with phase missiles. Don't forget that ALL your fighter craft use phase missiles. The "disable" type ability is like a lesser gravity warhead, which can allow you to disable small piles of enemy cruisers and frigates. This allows you to inflict decent damage on even fleeing fleets, as you'll manage to disable several of them and pick them off while the rest flee.

Overseers aren't so great, in my mind. They're worth keeping around for detecting enemy fleets and slowing phase jumps to your location, and their "temporary hull points" ability is fair, but they're nowhere near as all-important as subverters. Always have some around, but don't go overboard.

The "exploder missiles" ability for the Vasari Assailants is great because it can be in use 100% of the time if you want to. Make use of it.

Don't forget that navigators have the extractor claiming power and not your colony ships. This means in the early game, you get a big boost in resources provided you stumble upon an asteroid belt, gas giant, or space junk.

Enforcers get an ability that halves enemy speed. Use it religiously. Combined with the rest of your fleet, it makes it easy to pin down fleeing enemies and bite off big chunks.

Skirmishers and Enforcers get the Reintegration ability as well, so they can quickly recover from combats. Considering that they will be your frontline ships, it's a very useful ability post-battle.

That's about it, really. There are a couple other late-game abilities for the scouts and skirmishers that I have never found really justify continuing to build those ships over Enforcers and various other options.

The colonize ability of the Evacuator does colonize planets, the increased production speed must just be a bonus to keep it usefull when you arn't colonizing anymore.

for the skill Deploy Siege Platform, to use it so that it attacks the planet, you have to use the skill ON the planet you wish to attack. Placing it near the planet will not work...this is probably a bug.

@OP,

Here are the non-capital ship abilities:

Jikaras Navigator

Explore: All scouts have this obvious ability.

Capture Extractor: Builds extractors on unclaimed asteroids.

Phasic Cloaking: Allows the Navigator to shift between phase space and real space anytime, anywhere(no specific position or charge-up time required to jump).

Unstoppable Phase Jump: Ignores Phase Jump Inhibitors.

Kanrak Assailant

Charged Missiles: Disables the Assailant's engines but gives it longer range and the ability to do area effect damage. Can be deadly if the Charged Phase Missiles penetrate enemy shields and then explode with splash damage. What's more, this ability can remain active through the length of the battle.

Ravastra Skirmisher

Cripple Abilities: Straightaway knocks out all the abilities of a target frigate or cruiser, but doesn't work on capital ships.

Reintegration: Fully repairs the Skirmisher from time to time.

Junsurak Sentinel

Charged Missiles: Same as the Assailant's ability, the Sentinel can disable it's engines in exchange for longer range and splash warheads. Good against enemy strike craft squadrons since multiple fighters/bombers get hit at once, and this ability never requires a cool-down or antimatter supply, so it has unlimited duration.

Severun Overseer

Reactive Nanite Armor: Repairs a friendly target ship by 250 damage immediately and increases it's hitpoints and armor while in use.

Mobile Phase Detection: Detects any hostile ships phase jumping to the gravity well occupied by the Overseer.

Jump Degradation: Slows down all hostile ships phase jumping towards the gravity well occupied by the Overseer.

Stilakus Subverter

Defeat Shields: Gives all nearby friendly ships a 25% increase in the chance for their attacks to bypass enemy shields, irrespective of what kind of weapon the friendly ships are using! Even Skirmishers can bypass shields, mitigation, and regeneration defenses when they are empowered by a nearby Subverter using this ability.

Distortion Field: Disables a target enemy ship for 30 seconds, knocking out their abilities and phase drives and effectively reducing them to sitting ducks.

Skarovas Enforcer

Inertial Field: Throws up an aura inside which all hostile ships get their speeds halved. I don't know if this stacks or not, but if it does, enemy strike craft attacks could be ruined by a fleet of Enforcers and enemy heavy cruisers would never be able to reach firing range.

Reintegration: Same as the Skirmisher's ability, the Enforcer can also periodically initiate full self-repairs and thus fight many hard duels in quick succession.

Aren't the 12/15 damage ratings boosts over the base of 30(Sentinel - 1 side) and 78(Assailant)? And are the range figures increases in firing range, or explosion radii?

So the Sentinel would be doing 42 damage(before NME Warheads) against 3 strikecraft, so it's dealing 126 damage actually. With it's 4 launchers, it could deal 504 damage every 6 seconds spread out over 3 to 12 strikecraft, for a total of 84 DPS! Without the ability, it would deal 30 damage to 1-4 strikecraft for a total of 120 damage and 20 DPS. With Charged Phase Missiles armed with NME Warheads, it would be dealing 50.4 damage to each bomber for a max of 100.8 DPS!!! Illuminators beware.

And the Assailant, with Charged Missiles, would at best be dealing 93 damage to 4 targets for a total of 372 damage over 7 seconds for 53.1 DPS. With NME Warheads, it would go up to 63.7 DPS.

Just to be clear: Grav warhead is AoE. And in my opinion it is easily the best ability in the whole game. I rarely lack the firepower to take a ship down, but i always need the ability to make a ship stay while i take it down.

Remember, nothing bring a bigger smile to your face, than to see your enemies precious capital ship go down, then start running and become stranded just when it is about to enter phase space. I tend to wait until the last moment as it charges up, not only to maximize the time i can keep firing on it, but also to torment the poor guy making him believe he will actually get away.

The only thing with this ability is that you need lvl3 / or phase inhibitors / to make sure the enemy can not flee while the ability recharges. Or you just use 2 evacuators that way noone will ever leave unless you want to.

Also, considering how slow the space whale is, its wise to bring the cap with the speed boost along, so that you can actually catch someone.

Devastator: Disruptive strikes is great vs cap ships in long fights, esp since its a passive ability (no micro)

Skirantra: Replicate can instantly clone a few enforcers, quite useful but I'd rather have a direct dmg power to take down caps faster

Evacuator: grav warhead & nano are nice, but Evacuator is not a battleship. It's too slow and dies too fast to be combat useful in mid/late games

Desolator: siege platform is range bugged. Useless unless microed

It buffs the recharge rate of the Devastator's weapons (greatly improving it's damage output) and its shield regeneration. It's a pretty awesome buff.


Depends on how many strike craft you're running into. Handy but not that great, in my opinion, as it doesn't actually damage the targets.


Does exactly what it says - gives a chance to reduce the target's antimatter and increase the recharge of their abilities every time the Dev hits with its energy weapons.

Passive, and can be surprisingly useful against enemy Caps.


Yeah, it's pretty cool.


It doesn't stack with another repair cloud, but it does stack with different repair abilities (like the self-repair on upgraded light frigates and heavy cruisers).

If you do have two or more Carrier Caps, just don't fire it from them all at the same time.

All Caps are pretty durable, so you can have them backing up the front lines. If this makes you nervous, Repair Cloud is still useful after a battle is over, to get the fleet back to prime condition much more quickly than through auto-repair alone.

The Vasari Caps have a lot abilities that make them well-suited to raiding well behind enemy lines, and this is one of them.


Yup. I believe the duration is twice the recharge, so until you run out of antimatter, you can actually get two extra squadrons of bombers out by firing it every time it recharges.


It gives strike craft in the area a chance to teleport towards their target every few seconds, allowing them to close range faster (and thus increase their damage output). Also, for the second they're teleporting, they can't be attacked.

If you're not afraid to bring you carrier cap up to the front lines, where your strike craft are fighting, it can be quite handy (it's passive, so it's on all the time). If you're going to sit back from the action, though, it's less useful.


It creates copies of the target friendly ship - basically it allows you to create new ships for 'free' (no cost in cash or resources).

Another of the abilities that allow the Vasari Caps to work well in enemy territory - if your fleet takes losses, you can replace them 'in the field', given time (it's antimatter cost and recharge are fairly hefty).


Yup, colonies it creates will build structures quicker for a time.


The duration is listed on the info card for the ability - I don't remember it off-hand.

I'm not sure if it's AoE or not - I've only ever used it to stop enemy Cap ships from jumping away, so I've not paid attention to whether it also affects nearby ships.


It's a nice DoT and a hefty armour debuff. Very nice offensive ability for a colony Cap ship, in my opinion.


Steals resources from enemy planets at a pretty high rate - even if you don't have time to kill an enemy planet before the player brings it back up, it can be very useful in 'raid' attacks.


It takes a target enemy ship out of the fight for a short duration. Great for use against enemy Cap ships.


This is a pretty awesome ability that can be used offensively (to close on enemy vessels, especially fleeing ones), defensively (to escape a battle) or just to get from one system to another quicker.


It's a 'raid' ability - useful when trying to harry the enemy rather than actually attacking in force.

If you don't use those kind of strategies, it's not much use, I agree.


Yup, this is another awesome ability, and particularly well suited to working deep in enemy territory.


Yup - hits more than one target, so best used on groups of enemy ships.


Helps you take down enemy planets quicker, it's as simple as that.


Does two things - helps you take down enemy planets quicker and does pretty massive extra damage to orbital structures. The second makes it handy in raids.


Massive DoT, and repairs the Desolator's hull at the same time. A great anti-Cap ship ability.

As I've mentioned, Vasari Caps have many abilities that allow them to survive deep in enemy territory and make them well-suited to raids on enemy planets, where the goal is to quickly cripple enemy planets and jump out before a defending fleet arrives.

At the same time, the solid damage abilities allow them to perform well in 'stand-up' fights.

on Auto it places siege platforms too far out from planets to fire.

I really don't see the use of that, either. Ooh no, my structures build a tiny bit slower. Whatever shall I do? I don't usually find myself with more money than I can spend, so slowing production a tiny bit isn't an issue for me, as I don't notice it when I can't afford stuff anyway. If this STOPPED all production it would be awsome. As it is, I never put any points into it.

The siege platform takes 40 seconds to build.

Seeing as the Desolator has to be within 2600 units of a planet to cast it, and the siege platform can hit a planet from 3000 units away, I'm guessing it's this delay that makes it seem non-functional.