Three special vessel types will be featured in Fleet Operations v3. Support ships, fighter carriers and troopships. Special vessel types can be identified by their yellow description text in their tooltip. I want to give you a closer look at them today.


Support Ships
If you have played the Preview Release you should already be familiar with support ships. Unlike ordinary vessels these will start with an initial special ability that doesn't need to be researched. In addition they can gain a Level 2 and Level 3 ability due to their system research.
The special abilities and roles of Support Ships diver greatly from race to race and from ship to ship. Some of them are still the same as in the v3 Preview Release, some have been changed a little, but all in all most special weapons got improved graphics.




Fighter Carriers
Fighters are not often seen in Star Trek shows, so fighter carriers are not meant to play a major role in Fleet Operations, but they are still a valuable asset. In fact there will be only two fighter carriers featured in Fleet Operations v3 which will be the Federation Avalon Class and the Dominion Battle Cruiser.
The Avalon and the Battle Cruiser can launch Fighter squads for a small amount of resources and supply costs. These Fighter squads will then act as seperate units, although you can neither select nor order or attack them. They will patrol between the carriers location at the moment they were launched and the chosen target location, attacking all opponents that come into their range.
Fighters will also not stand still but swarm the target to give you the real space battle feeling!
An interesting fact for building strategies with fighters: Fighters are ignored by hostiles as long as there are other targets around. That means that fighters are a good support for a fleet, but on their own they will suffer from their weak shields and just give you a small fire work made of their explosions.




Troopships
Troopships are as rare as fighter carriers. The Dominion in v3 will get a new vessel, available for all avatars, the War Frigate, and the Klingons may upgrade their Vutpa' Class with the new Call to Arms upgrade, to grant it Troopship status.
Troopships bring back the famous Transporter Assault feature from vanilla Armada 2. In addition they do usually have a larger crew pool and increased fighting strength when boarding themselves or being boarded. Here are some pictures of the War Frigate in action!

cool 

The next version of FO will indeed be significant!

hehe yep we thought about that too. but i think we will stick with the "Pre Release", cause it should clearly identify that it does not meet our personal quality standards in every sector v3 will be the first "real" Fleet Operations release

Is the Remore Class still in and unchanged? I love that ship in PR.

Yep the Remore is in and not changed except some visuals for her special abilities and some balancing adjustments made to all vessels

Black Baron, Assault Ships are good even in the stock. It can be fun to take an entire armada then use it against the enemy without losing any of your ships. Assault Ships would also be better for Borg than Dominion, I'd expect them to board more often.

I didnt say they were not good, I just said I didnt use them all that often I didnt play stock A2 all that much either lol it always came down to battleship rush so it got boring real soon.
While I agree that the Borg do like boarding ships, they can basically do it from any ship. Their crew count is big enough so I dont think they really need a dedicated marine ship I think the Dominion will do fine with it