The Cylon Fleet Review
By Sharkman

Cat's Paw Class Destroyer
The Cylon's only torpedo ship, quite a decent ship but won't stand up well in a fight. Better than the Empire's Frigate because it can carry a lot of torpedoes and coupled with the Cylons 4x minelaying bonus can create huge minefields. Can also be used to tow the bigger baseships. You must have these because you can't sweep mines very well, the baseships are poorly equipped with beams. The only way to get rid of them is lay a bigger field of your own and knock out the enemy's minefield this way. But make an effort to trade/steal a better torp ship. Ideally, a cloaking minelayer is what you want as the Bots, best choice is the Resolute if at all possible. However any reasonably experienced Romulan commander will be reluctant to let you as Bots have one of these unless you are in a really close alliance.

Roles: Fleet support mining ship, light interceptor, armed freighter

Iron Slave Class Baseship
The Imperium now has little use for this outdated design. Cannot fight, and builds fighters very slowly, especially compared to the Rebel/Colonial Gemini. Stay away from this ship, use the more powerful baseships available. If you must have a ship queue soaking ship (and I do recommend saturating the ship queue, it can only benefit you, as a fighter race, by stopping others from building ships) then use the QTanker, it is cheap and can build fighters almost twice as fast.

Roles: Light Interceptor, fighter factory

Q Tanker
This is the Cylon's fighter builder and fuel tanker combined into a single ship. Very useful but needless to say it cannot fight and must be escorted. Still it would be advantageous to get hold of a Gemini, which performs a lot better. Have a few (2-4) of these around each starbase world to build the fighters and transfer them off to waiting baseships. You can build these with transwarps and have them tow the baseships into battle, although a probably better alternative would be to have the baseships tow each other into battle, using the sacrificial lamb tactic that is all too popular with commanders of large armadas.

Roles: Fighter factory, fuel transporter, non-combat fleet support ship

Pawn Class Baseship
Has the best bioscanner in the game, but costs a ludicrous amount of duranium, and it isn't really that much good, you should be colonising all the planets in range anyway. May be useful right at the beginning, but more often than not it is bad for your empire because it will deplete the Duranium stores instantly! Just build freighters and the occasional capital ship and simply take over all the planets within range, whether they have good natives or not! By the time you can build one without draining your resources, you have already explored the planets and know which ones to develop first! Don't even think about building one of these early in poor mineral galaxies / poor start resources.

Roles: Exploration, Bioscanning

Cybernaut Class Baseship
The Cybernaut is a pretty dangerous opponent for most torp ships but you have other more effective ships available, the Instrumentality has more firepower and uses 50 less duranium. If Raceplus is being used consider building these, I am not sure about their effectiveness because I haven't played that many games under Raceplus, but repairing after combat should be very useful provided the ships survive. Forget about BMR (build more robots!) as Robotic baseships have loads of crew anyway and it would take quite a few skirmishes to diminish that.

Roles: Medium combat vessel, heavy interceptor

Instrumentality Class Baseship
The mainstay of the Cylon armada. Heavy and strong, it can tackle almost any torp ship your enemies can throw at you. It should be loaded with 80 fighters, equipped with X-Rays and escorted by a Cat's Paw for maximum performance. Use these for patrolling important areas of your empire but don't move them around too much, they are heavier than most ships and tend to gobble up a lot of fuel. Its probably best to build them with HeavyNovas and tow them around with QTankers or Cat's Paws, as the cost of building 4 transwarps for each Instrumentality will soon catch up with you. However I prefer to use a transwarp Instrumentality to tow a nova or heavy nova Instrumentality (the so-called classical sacrificial lamb tactic). Do NOT use stardrive 1s, if an intercept picks off your tow ship, the sacrificial lamb becomes stranded and cannot get anywhere due to its garbage engines!

Roles: Medium combat vessel, heavy interceptor

Automa Class Baseship
It's slightly greater firepower when compared to the Instrumentality is misleading, if you can afford the tech upgrade and extra engines this ship offers much more flexibility and performance than the Instru while costing only a little more minerals. It can build fighters much faster than the Instru and can take on many torp ships in a row due to its higher mass and fighter payload.

Roles: Fleet combat vessel, heavy defence ship

Golem Class Baseship
The Cylon Imperium's supercarrier, it rules the battlefield but requires a substantial investment of MC and minerals. It is also a pain to move around, its massive size and 8-engine requirement being a huge drawback. But if the Imperium wishes to conquer the cluster in a registered game, it needs a few of these to take down large fleets. It can crush 2 or 3 battleships (sometimes 4 if Engine-Shield Bonus is on) before biting the dust. In a shareware game, don't go out of your way to specially develop humanoid planets, the Instrumentality is plenty powerful enough.

Roles: Cylon flagship. Heavy fleet combat vessel