The Umbral Choir/Ships

Observers and infiltrators, the Umbral Choir seeks to understand--and heal--the galaxy.

About
Gameplay
Traits
**Ships**
Strategy

This page lists all of the ships available to this faction, and lists what sort of equipment they're able to equip.

Each ship in the game has a set of slots it can equip armaments on; these are limited to only allow certain kinds of things in certain slots. This is indicated with a series of icons. If a slot includes more than one icon, then it can hold either kind of equipment.

 = **Attack**: slugs, missiles, lasers, beams, et al. Notably does *not* include fighters/bombers.

 = **Defense**: shields and armor.

 = **Utility**: engines, damage enhancers, targeting modifiers. Some items like probes are limited to explorer vessels, and some other modules can only be equipped on support ships.

 = **Squadron**: i.e. fighters/bombers.

 = **Heavy Weapons**: A weapon slot with doubled stats, which also can mount certain exotic weapons like Blast Effect Batteries, or on Carrier-class ships, can even mount Core Crackers.

Each ship comes with several  neutral slots, which are available immediately once the ship is available. Most ships have a second upgrade that can be researched which unlock a set of additional slots, but to equip an item in these slots, you have to pay a single unit of a strategic resource, such as  or .

Every kind of hull has a name to it, but every particular player-designed equipment loadout does as well. We list the default name the game gives for the equipment loadout in quotes after the hull class name.

Ships have a  size modifier which multiplies the cost of a piece of equipment, and the power of it. Ships also have a  command-points modifier which lists how many 'slots' a ship takes in a fleet. Neither of these vary from faction to faction.

To make the information easy to read, we tally up the number of different slot types available to a ship under the heading **"Available Slots"**. Quite a few slots are hybrid slots, so this number varies depending on what you commit the slot to being, since using a slot for one purpose means you're now *short* one slot for whatever the other option was. Because of this, these numbers are usually a "range" rather than a single value.

A first thing that must be mentioned is that all Umbral Choir ships have cloaking. Not just the faction-specific ones, but even the minor-faction/mercenary ships, hero ships - everything. It's as though they've all been equipped with cloaking modules (which can be turned on and off), but it's just a passive thing they get for free without needing to equip a module. It's upgraded at similar places in the military tech tree to where other factions would get cloaking modules (albeit at earlier tech stages), but it's just instantly applied to everything.

Note that the UC does **not** however get any special **detection** bonus - they have to detect cloaked ships the hard way just like everyone else. The closest thing they have to a unique bonus is that UC heroes, which they're guaranteed to have some access to, have a skill that does give Tier 3 detection to their fleet.

In all other respects, the Umbral Choir ships are just ordinary ES2 spaceships.

Most Umbral Choir ships have a lot of defense and especially utility slots, and it's very common for them to have hybrid defense/utility slots. The gross implication of this is that they're generally pretty fast, and/or tanky, and even when optimizing for defense they'll still have rather good speed.

## Colonizer

The Umbral Choir does not use colonization ships, and unlike a few other factions, they don't have an offbeat "utility ship" (like the Vodyani  harvester) that outfits similarly. Creating your closest equivalent of colonies - "Sanctuaries", is done via the hacking interface instead.

## Explorer

  Slots

**Available Slots:**

Total:  = 0 ~ 2,  = 2 ~ 4,  = 4

**Strategic Implications:**

Since you can't shoot back, all that equipping the defense modules would do would be to allow you to survive perhaps 1/3 of a usual fight (against a ~2CP fleet) for 1/3 of the battle. Because of this, you'll almost universally want to treat this as a ship with 4 utility slots.

This is utterly useless as an "early-game cheap fighter", it's also one of the best "actually being used for exploration" explorer ships.

One of the side-effects of this is that, as the UC, you'll more or less be required to build some L1 attacker/protector to deal with the pirates that will inevitably spawn near you, since otherwise you'll truly have nothing but your hero ship.

## Attacker

  Slots

**Available Slots:**

Base: = 2,  = 1,  = 2,  = 5

Upgrade: = 0 ~ 1,  = 1 ~ 2,  = 0 ~ 2,  = 3

Total:= 2 ~ 3,  = 2 ~ 3,  = 2 ~ 4,  + = 8

**Strategic Implications**

This is a reasonably well-rounded ship. It's got enough utility slots to keep up with the protector if you want have super-fast 4-engine ships, and it'll still have 2 attack/2 defense left over in that case, but you can also kit this in the direction of a 2-engine ship with 3 attack/3 defense slots.

If you compare that latter loadout to e.g. the Riftborn attacker ship, it's simply got less slots overall (the Riftborn attack can do 2-engine with 4 attack/4 defense). It's still a pretty serviceable ship without any strong weaknesses.

## Protector

  Slots

**Available Slots:**

Base: = 1,  = 1 ~ 2,  = 2 ~ 3,  = 5

Upgrade:  = 1 ~ 2,  = 1 ~ 2,  = 3

Total:= 1,  = 2 ~ 4,  = 3 ~ 5,  +  = 8

**Strategic Implications**

This ship has only 1 attack slot, but has a great deal of defense and especially, utility slots.

Besides the obvious tack of slotting the utility slots with enhancers/etc, another key strategic option is equipping at least one of the slots with either the "Wildlife Unit" (+10 /turn) or the "Self-Surveiller" (+5 /turn) granted in the first part of the UC quest. Essentially, the designers gave you some spare slots for a reason.

## Coordinator

  Slots

**Available Slots:**

Base: = 0 ~ 2,  = 0 ~ 2,  = 3 ~ 4,  = 2 ~ 4,  = 8

Upgrade:  = 1,  = 1,  = 1,  = 3

Total:  = 1, = 0 ~ 2,  = 0 ~ 2,  = 4 ~ 5,  = 3 ~ 5,  +  = 11

**Strategic Implications**

This ship has a slightly low number of attack slots, and an ample collection of both defense and utility slots. It's a very straightforward "tank".

## Hunter

  Slots

**Available Slots:**

Base: = 2 ~ 3,  = 1 ~ 2,  = 3 ~ 5,  = 8

Upgrade:  = 1, = 1,  = 1,  = 3

Total:  = 1, = 3 ~ 4,  = 2 ~ 3,  = 3 ~ 5,  +  = 11

**Strategic Implications**

This ship is a bit low on defense slots, has a decent number of attack slots, and a bunch of utility slots (potentially 5). This is a fairly straightforward "DPS" ship.

## Carrier

  Slots

**Available Slots:**

Base:  = 1, = 0 ~ 2,  = 0 ~ 2,  = 2 ~ 4,  = 3 ~ 5,  = 10

Upgrade:  = 1, = 0 ~ 2,  = 0 ~ 1,  = 1 ~ 2,  = 1 ~ 2,  = 3,  = 2

Total:  = 2, = 0 ~ 4,  = 0 ~ 3,  = 3 ~ 6,  = 4 ~ 7,  +  +  = 15

**Strategic Implications**

The UC carrier has a rather low number of Squadron modules - only 3. Following with the common theme they have, it's got a fair number of defense and utility slots. You may want to field some fighters if enemies are bringing bombers to bear, but broadly speaking you'll probably want to equip this ship as a gunboat/tank hybrid.