Do civilian ships surve any purpose? Why should I bother with them.?
Civilian ships are largely 1 of 2 things:
- Dedicated transport ships of some description
- A conversion of the above into something that can kind of fight
There are a few exceptions, but generally thay fall into one of those two categories.
Transport ships are useful for carrying supplies and loot, fuel, and crew. You probably won't need one for every occaision, but it's usually a good idea to have some in your fleet. And once you pass a certain 'mass' of ships, it becomes really hard to do anything without them.
They all can also have mods installed on them which help you in some way.
You can also use transports to accept a large cargo mission, or found a colony and then once it's complete store them until needed again.
One thing to consider is having a few Shepherds in your fleet. They may not look all that impressive, but they can really help in the early game.
The converted ships are not supposed to be good. They're little more than a transport with a gun stuck on the front and some armour plate bolted onto the sides. They're the sort of thing you use when you have nothing else, and mostly exist for the pirates to use so the player can have some weak enemies to start off with.
However some conversions are really good at one thing, usually at the expense of everything else (including survival).
Are mining ships or slavaging ships usefull? What mor do I get from them?
Depends how you play.
If you spend a lot of time combing through debris fields and salvaging derelict ships and stations, then dedicated salvage ships can help noticeably by increasing the quantities of resources recovered. These tend to be specialised ships which cannot be modified out of thier role. Nor can you add this ability to a ship, so you have to use what's available with that ability.
If you like to scan planets then survey ships can reduce the costs to do so. Survey ships are sometimes specialised, but any ship can be modified with this ability (which fits really well with transports as you don't have to give up any combat ability, because they don't have any).
Both benefit from stacking multiples of each for a greater effect.
As far as I know, there are no mining ships. (This may be from a mod.)
