My problem with AI Fury is its cowardice. Once it decides to retreat, it takes too long for it to escape because it is not very fast at going anywhere but forward.
That's a strange argument to make when comparing the Fury and the Apogee, considering the Fury has a base speed of 90 while the Apogee has a base speed of 60. The Apogee could put on Unstable Injector and still be much slower.
Aurora has an easier time escaping (because of jets), but if an ion beam zaps engines through the shields, it suffers like Fury. So far, AI Aurora could take out Falcon, but it had more difficulty than Apogee.
That applies equally to the Apogee. It makes no sense to say the Aurora has more difficulty taking out a target than the Apogee, considering how much more speed, weapon mounts, and flux it has, so this almost certainly comes down to a bad loadout being used.
P.S. Tried the Pulse Laser loadout recommended above with AI Fury twice, but it died horribly against SIM Falcon like every other non-SO loadout I tried.
Here's a video of AI Fury using the weapons above taking out the SIM Falcon in 38 seconds, followed by an AI Apogee using a Plasma Cannon and Locust doing the same in...449 seconds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gktB9kIkCoMNo officers, no s-mods, no Safety Overrides.
The Apogee is simply too slow. The SIM Falcon sometimes goes in to attack, but takes armor/hull damage only if it happened to be in cooldown on jets so it couldn't move away fast enough (i.e. such as if it used its jets to move in). Once it's taken some hull damage, though, it goes into coward mode, always backing up, and the Apogee simply can't catch up to finish it off. So the Apogee basically ends up chasing it all around the map until the SIM Falcon makes a mistake. Whereas the Fury simply keeps advancing, and its weapons are enough to overpower the Falcon.
If we for example look at fighting [REDACTED] fleets, consider the base speeds of the different ships:
140 Lumen
130 Glimmer
100 Shrike
100 Medusa
90 Fury
85 Fulgent
80 Aurora
70 Odyssey
60 Apogee
60 Scintilla
60 Brilliant
40 Radiant
The Fury and the Aurora (since it has jets) can back away from all ships except the frigates. The only ship the Apogee can back away from is the Radiant, and that's assuming the Radiant doesn't chase after it with phase skimmer. So the Apogee has to really make sure it can kill something (and not get surrounded) since it can't back off; it commits to the fight, like a Low Tech ship, unless it has SO. In fact the Apogee is about the only non-capital High-Tech ship that can't back off easily unless it has SO; even the Odyssey at 70 base speed can back off from most of the ships, and it can easily pummel the ships it can't back off from unless it gets surrounded.
The Apogee has a huge flux pool, which makes it a really good tank. But its low speed makes it difficult to go on the offensive unless it has SO, and you have to go on the offensive to win battles quickly and efficiently. With SO it's very much a beast because it's fast and is a good tank; but it suffers from not enough mounts to make use of all that flux. (Although, since it's underfluxed, this arguably makes it more dangerous since it can absorb a lot of soft flux damage and keep firing.)
For [REDACTED] farming I ended up going with the Apogee for a completely different reason: AI Fury will unabashedly plasma burn into hulks, making themselves flameout, usually at high speed flying into the enemy fleet and thus dying, without me being able to do anything about it. Assuming that doesn't happen, SO Fury generally beats SO Apogee in damage, since a Cryoblaster is going to do roughly as much damage as a Plasma Cannon (at much cheaper OP), so it's really just down to Large Missile + Small Missile vs Medium Missile + Medium Synergy in terms of weapon mounts. (Both have the same 2 Small Energies.) The Fury is also faster so it can go from hotspot to hotspot faster, increasing its overall damage, although the Apogee has more flux capacity so it doesn't need to back off as often.
