YMMV / Space Pirates and Zombies

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Final Boss is one. Supposedly, the gimmick is to let your mothership fire a beam to weaken it and you have to damage the boss during the beam, and retreat while the beam is rearming, but nothing is stopping you from just slapping on a bunch of cannon boosters and mass drivers as the Final Boss lacks shields, or if you have one, using a Manta Ray with leech and fusion emitters to just crack the thing open in a matter of seconds. If you got all three fleet upgrades to 100%, the boss becomes completely trivial as you can have Hammerheads, Star Cruisers, Carriers and Sunspots that will quickly rip apart any zombie ships that dare get in your way.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • This will happen quickly if the zombies take over too many of your ships, especially your larger ones, in a short period of time. In those cases, its probably best to do a mass retreat, or Rage Quit, though hopefully you saved prior to getting swarmed on that level.
  • Big Brother ships, if they're carrying drones. They're the one time where the AI doesn't charge in with reckless abandon. Instead, they'll hang out at the edge of the system and attack whatever the mission objective is with their drones. It's entirely probable for them to take out whatever you're protecting before you've managed to reach and destroy them.
  • The Manta Ray. To quote the now defunct wiki, "The Manta Ray is not subtle. It is not polite. The only professionality it possesses is in its sleek, menacing appearance. It is a vicious, terrifying warmachine capable of cracking other Huge hulls in half and tossing them aside like they're nothing but flimsy shells, to say nothing of the effect it has on smaller vessels. Beware the configuration with eight Fusion Beam Emitters and two Leech Emitters; not only will it destroy your ships, but it will render them utterly incapable of returning fire." If you're going up against this thing, you may need to say your prayers if you don't have a build kitted specifically to take this thing down.
  • Ravens. Especially in chapter 4 where the zombies throw groups of two or three of them at a time, and they have bomber drones. They can quickly tear you and the Clockwork 2 apart. Even worse they commonly come with cloaking, making it hard to pin down where all those damn drones are coming from.
  • Any ship that has a bomber mount that deploys Battlestations. These small but absurdly deadly things can quickly tear into any ship, and even if you manage to destroy it through its Fortress Shield, Heavy Armor and high hull, the opposing ship can simply drop another in just a few seconds.
• Game-Breaker: Several, especially with a loadout that synergizes well with these things:
  • Mines currently do good damage against all health types, but the broken aspect is that the enemy AI suicidally charges into any dropped mine fields, regardless of enemies nearby.
  • The Particle Cannon is effective against everything, has minimal power use, and is really accurate. The game knows this, too; the Battle Station deployable turret has two medium Particle Cannons along with heavy armor and shielding. If you're willing to explore the galaxy in Chapter 2, you can potentially acquire it before "Big Fish".
  • The leech beam is so efficient that one or two can easily compensate for the heavy power draw of a ship with a fusion beam in all the other slots, without any reactor boosters. It even has longer range than the fusion beam, so if you're hitting the target with a fusion beam, you're hitting them with the leech beam and recharging yourself at the same time.
  • The Carrier with micro missiles, and nothing but Launcher Boosters and Engine Boosters. This might sound like a Joke Character, but it quickly becomes a Lethal Joke Character with just how fast you can unleash a Macross Missile Massacre. Even heavily shielded opponents can only withstand the onslaught of missiles for half a minute before their shields inevitably fall, and the Engine Boosters can turn the Carrier into a Lightning Bruiser with extreme mobility, outrunning anything that tries to give chase. Even a ship with nothing but point defense modules will be unable to stop the tide of incoming missiles. This build can also completely annihilate Zombie breeder ships, especially the ever annoying Zombie Tick.
  • Many of the bounty hunter ships, as long as you use their over-abundance of utility slots to compensate for their Crippling Overspecialization:
    • The Claw racks two medium weapons on a tiny hull. It has no utility slots to put reactor boosters on, but the damage you can inflict with it as your number three or number four ship is far more than you could before the expansion.
    • The Cyclops, a small hull with a huge mount. Unlike the Claw, it does have utility slots, and is especially effective with either a beam or the particle canon. With the latter, you can mount cannon boosters instead of reactor boosters.
    • The Brute fills the Hammerhead's role but is a Large hull instead of Huge, freeing up your Huge slot for something else or for a Hammerhead anyway.
    • The Mammoth has about as much firepower as the Hammerhead, more health, more crew, more cargo space, more utility mounts, and a large mass bomb/mines/deploy-able turret mount (deploy-able turrets are especially effective with it). It has six utility mounts, two huge and four large. It can be configured for almost any role and will carry out that role very effectively, be it DPS, siege, rez collection and then some. About its only downside is that it has no missile mounts, so if you want to use it to chase faster targets, you have to put a mass bomb on it.
    • The Manta Ray has less durability than the Mammoth and has fixed gun mounts, which it makes up for with ten large gun mounts on the front. Remember that bit about the leech gun and how well it works above? Two of them on the middle two gun mounts can drain enough power to supply fusion beams in all the others (the bounty hunters will do this to you). The Manta Ray makes stations (normal ones or zombie equivalents) a breeze, and helps immensely with destroying a Level 4 Bounty Hunter base.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Drones are largely seen this way. The artifact protection mission is basically impossible if one of the UTA ships has them, because they target the artifacts and are difficult to destroy without accidentally hitting the artifacts. Zombies floating in space can be this way too later in the game.
  • Cloaked ships. This is bad enough for enemies, especially larger hulls which like to pitch gravity missiles from long distances. It is a nightmare for friendly ships, which won't let you see them yet will suicidally charge into your line of fire then blame you for shooting them.
  • Enemy ships with leech beams. They guzzle all your power so they can whale on you with no fear of reprisal.
• That One Achievement: The Arena Master achievement requires you to slog through 150 fights. While most of them are simple slog fests, the last few ladders can be downright brutal to complete. All in all, you'll be spending around eight hours to get this one achievement.