Are ships worth it?

Fleet arena is a million times easier than squad arena, for the sole reason that ships don't have mods. In squad you're always going to be overshadowed by that one lucky dingdong who somehow ended up with a set of 30 perfect mods that make his squad just utterly untouchable.

In fleet the playing field is pretty much level - you improve your ships by improving the pilots, but once they're fully G12'd and 6e modded, that's it, they don't get any better. So you don't have that one guy that just completely dominates despite running the same team as you.

Also, most people seem to really, really hate ships for some reason (I don't get it, I love them) so the competition tends to not be as fierce for top spots.

Ships in my shard are much more gentlemanly, way less active that squad arena, easier to hit #1, and say what you want about HMF it's a whole lot more fun playing those matches that wading through the seas of Revan. It does seem to me like ships is a bit more about strategy, and arena is more about whether or not you have a couple hours of free time to paddle up to the top after falling 100+ ranks overnight...

My 2500+ Crystals a week says yes

*Laughs in crystals*

Yes

yes

The ship meta is currently easily beatable with

Any capital ship fully upgraded + g12 Fleet Commander (Thrawn is the obvious choice for low-investment play)

HT (Bossk)
Silencer (KRU)
Ghost (Phoenix)
Phantom II (Phoenix)
Cassian's U-Wing (Rogue 1)
+ 1 more good attacker. Han's Falcon works. So does Vader's TIE. I put both in reinforcements but never get to use both in one battle.

If you look at the crew needed, they're already either highly desirable (Vader, Han, Chewie, KRU, Bossk) or very useful in TB and TW/GA (Phoenix & R1).

Yes, Phoenix is far from meta, but they're not useless & I only geared my to g11, not g12, and my fleet takes #1 every single day with no trouble. I never even fall farther than 9th and most days I don't even fall as far as 5th, so I only need to fight the #1 spot once and I'm done for the day.

I don't think that ships are very fun, and I think ships swaying in place waiting for their turns look completely ridiculous and not like space ships at all. BUT, I get 400 crystals per day, every day.

What could you do with 2800 crystals per week? How about 32 shards from shipments.

What could you do with 12,000 crystals per month? How about 152 shards from shipments.

What could you do with 146,000 crystals per year? How about everything in the galaxy?

That's what we're talking about. I refresh Cantina energy 3x per day (300 crystals total) and regular energy 3 x per day (150), and I still increase by over 100 crystals per day on average, slowly stocking up until some panic farming is needed ... but mostly I don't need to panic farm anyway because my crystal production keeps me farming at a high rate all the time.

The meta will change, and someday I'll need new ships (though my squad hasn't really changed since the HT revolution while the meta has changed a couple times around me), but by that time I'll be done farming IG-2000 and Xanadu Blood (both about 50/100 right now) freeing me up to farm new things, and whatever I need to invest in will cost me a lot less than I've gained from finishing first every day for so long.

Are ships worth it? Well, they've made my toons dramatically better than they would have been. They made my ewok farm for 3PO downright easy while others who had invested nothing in ewoks before the first 3PO event are still sweating blood to have their teams ready. Yes, it required investing in toons and ships, but Phoenix and R1 are solid second-tier investments anyway, and the others are top-tier and there's no way I wouldn't have invested in them even if ships didn't exist. The only real distractions from putting resources into toons have been Xanadu Blood & IG-2000, each sucking up over 100 regular energy per day for a couple months now. But I'm not worried about it. You don't get anything for free, but if the biggest penalty is having to do 2 or 3 long-farms on hard nodes, that's nothing compared to the 400 crystals/day.

Yeah. Ships are worth it.

Thanks for the help everyone !