Marauder

A light offensive ship. The cheapest ship you can put in front of an enemy and reasonably expect to do damage. It does its best work in numbers.

What it does

The Marauder exists to push. Enough offense to hurt something, not nearly enough defense to soak a serious response. Slower than a Probe, faster than a Sentinel.

Iridium-heavy in construction. A Marauder fleet leans harder on your Iridium Extractor than your palladium side.

Raiding dormant stars

Before your Command Center clears the Vanguard gate, Marauders give you an early way to turn a fight into resources. Send a fleet with no vanguard at a dormant star and, if it's carrying Marauders or Sentinels, it raids the outlaws holding the star and hauls salvage back to your depot. The salvage pool at each star drains as you raid it and refills slowly over time, so spreading raids across a few nearby dormant stars pays better than hitting the same one repeatedly. A fleet of probes alone carries no cargo and comes home empty.

Why it matters

The Marauder is the first ship that puts real damage into another player's fleet. Its offense stat (8) drives the kill chance for every shot it fires in a combat round. On its own it gets ground down by defended systems; in a group it overwhelms the rolls before the defender can answer.

Strategy

Marauders are most efficient in numbers. Every additional Marauder on the line is one more shooter rolling against every enemy ship and kill probability scales with stack size, and the per-roll chance is intentionally low. A handful of Marauders barely scratches a defended system; a few dozen reliably crack it.

Don't send a single Marauder against parked defenders. Even a lone defending probe has a non-zero chance of rolling lucky and wiping it.

The Marauder unlocks at Shipyard level 2, so it's within reach of a young empire that puts a little into the yard early.