Stellar Crisis 2.8 gives you a choice of eight different types of ships you can build. You start the game being able to build attack ships, science ships, and colony ships, and you gain the ability to choose one additional type of ship each time your tech level reaches a perfect square (1, 4, 9, 16, etc.) Given how long it takes in most games to reach the next tech level, you have to be careful in choosing which types of ships to build. Because choice of ships can easily be the determining factor in a game, I tend to hold off on selecting any of the ship types until the game has reached a point where I have enough information to see which types will be the most beneficial.
Ship selection should be determined by a combination of two main factors: personal preference and style, and how you are faring in the game. Some ships are more suited to different types of tactics, and each costs a different amount of resources to build and maintain. If you play a fast, aggressive game then you need little more than a stargate and mine sweepers. If you prefer subtlety and luring your opponents into traps, then you might want cloakers and engineers. All this is academic, though, if you are outnumbered, outgunned, and being pushed back toward your Home World. In this case you want to play defensively, probably relying heavily on satellites and minefields. You will also need to create engineers if your opponent has done the same and walled himself off.
One other factor that has become more important recently is the nature of the game series itself. Once upon a time there were only a half-dozen or so game series, each relatively alike in planet resources, rates of tech development, etc. Some of the new series have planetory resource levels and tech development increases so different from the more traditional game series that they force an alteration in style of play. A series with high mineral/fuel planets which also have low agriculture, for example, almost requires terraformers. Tech development rates which range from 0.1 per turn to 10 per turn can mean that, depending on the series, you'll never get above BR-2 and had better make your choice count, or that you'll gain new tech developments so fast that choosing now becomes irrelevant.
Ship Type Resources