Hoshikos are MUCH cheaper than overseers, and on a per-cost basis one of the best damage sinks in the game.  You can spam these guys with virtual impunity, there's nothing that can effectively counter them.  Their secondary ability is absolutely wicked, greatly diminishing the damage of your frigates if you can't disable the hoshikos.  A great unit overall, far better than the Overseer IMO.

Hoshikos can keep your fleet inside misisle barrage, while vasari ships would probably die unless enough HP upgrades because the Overseers would not be able to heal all the ships that fast.

Hoshikos are a really nice cushion for damage coming your way, that and they're incredibly cheap. You would be a fool to not keep a sizable number of them in your fleet.

HOWEVER

Vasari Overseers have their own advantages as well. While more expensive, you get plenty of bang for your buck. My reasons:

1. They're wonderful to include in an attack. They can sense incoming fleets so you can high-tail it out of there quickly if you're outmatched, and the jump degredation for the same reason.

2. Now here's where it gets controvertial. Personally, I like the Overseer's reactive nanite armor over the repair bots. This is because, in the heat of battle, if somthing is being hit so hard that it needs a repair, it will need it quickly. My main qualm with Hoshikos is that, while providing a nice comfy cushion for damage, it is not effective at truly assisting in survival. When a few seconds are all there is between the life and death of a capital ship, the instant 250 hull is wonderful, even if it is for a set amount of time. AND the armor bonus is a great boon to actually help your ship survive the battle.

Before I get flamed, I will say again: Hoshikos are wonderful things. Wonderful healing things. That on top of their destructo-bots makes them a powerful force. Not as "strategic" as the overseer, per se, but it's a nice combat boon, and who doesn't love that? 

[IE]Tal Gendron'nh

My problem with overseers is that I can't get them to autocast.  The autocast is on, but they just sit there and do nothing.  I just tried it again a few seconds ago in an online match.  Built one, it wouldn't autocast, so I didn't build anymore.  Wasted the research.  I mean, how am I supposed to compete with a tec player if his hoshikos are spamming repair automatically, while I am having to manually click on an overseer and manually click on a unit to heal up?

You forget Dunov. Its shield restore at high level can save your cap from focused fire....

.... But such action usually results in Dunov under focused fire...

That won't save much caps from a vasari fleet. Vasari will be like Oh! LOOK he restored his shield... cougsuckercough. Otherwise the dunov in combo with hoshi's and repairs is still quite cool. I love overseers better though.

Grtz,
[_]-Flipkik

Hmmmm, that sounds like overpowered....

But you are ignoring 66.67% of online players....