Most of the type C ships start you with some noticeable weakness, so yes they were probably made bad on purpose. Even the game admits it sometimes...

Zoltan C: "The designer of this ship was not willing to spend the money for a decent reactor."
Stealth C: "[...] Unfortunately this required the removal of the Cloaking system."
Federation C: "[...] only the most suicidal of infantry chooses to fly on this ship."

The bad ships are intentionally bad.

But not all of the C layouts are bad. Slug C is one of the best ships in the game. Engi C is a good ship, and definitely the best Engi ship. Rock C is at least average.

That's the fun bro, the difficulty. You get the Crystal Cruiser yet?

Slug C and Engi C are good. You can never go wrong with hacking, unless you really don't know what you're doing. But yes, C ships are here to showcase the new additions introduced in AE, and most of them are gimmicky. On the flip side, you also get a lot of meme values, like that "stealth" ship with no cloaking and desert camouflage, and the funny scrap cannon that can also fire Zoltan man bombs at your enemy.

Many high-level win streakers consider Engi C the best ship in the game. This is where "best" means "highest achievable win rate on Hard AE".

Usually the other two candidates are Lanius B and Crystal B. Some combination of these typically occupies the top three rankings.

Slug C is probably the best Slug ship, and Rock C is definitely the best Rock ship.

Stealth C is bad, but nowhere near as bad as Stealth B. Fed C is bad, but so are the other two Fed ships, and it's debatable which is worst. Kestrel C is fairly bad, and easily the worst Kestrel ship.

Mantis C is ... very complex early on, but not exactly a bad ship -- many win streakers would nowadays rank it above Mantis B, with most putting Mantis A as the best Mantis ship.

Zoltan C is bad and difficult. It's not as bad as people think, but probably still the weakest Zoltan ship by some margin.

So overall, out of 8 C-type ships:

• 3 are good or great ships and the best in their class.
  
• 4 are clearly bad, but at least one isn't the worst in its class.
  
• 1 is middling.

Seems like a vaguely even spread to me.

Originally posted by Evolve:

i find them utterly unfun to play.

I love all the class Cs. They're almost all hilariously bad. By the time you get them you should be open to playing completely horrible ships.

My favorite: Stealth C. A supposedly stealth ship that has no cloak, no shields, has all the crew in the wrong position, its only defense against drones is the most miserable anti-drone drone imaginable, what a fun ship to play! I always play this piece of ♥♥♥♥. This ship is literally an insult, a ♥♥♥♥-you ship, oh you unlocked the C, here's what you get, you get this absolute piece of ♥♥♥♥.

I rock this ship, though. It is aptly named after Simo Häyhä, a Finnish sniper who killed more Russians with iron sights than anyone in history, got shot in the head after a couple hundred, may have killed over a thousand in a few months, and lived to be 96 years old.

ok, i see. probably im not ready for that kind of fun.

Originally posted by Evolve:

ok, i see. probably im not ready for that kind of fun.

This is part of the fun though. Part of playing FTL at all is enjoying beating what the designers of the game considered unbeatable. They did not think wins in this game would be very common at all, much that people would do things like winstreaks where people beat it with unbroken streaks of winning with every single ship, even the terrible ones.

So making it even more difficult is just a step up.

It's like Battletoads was for platformers.

Get a grip.

Originally posted by Skinny Pete:

Originally posted by Evolve:

ok, i see. probably im not ready for that kind of fun.

This is part of the fun though. Part of playing FTL at all is enjoying beating what the designers of the game considered unbeatable. They did not think wins in this game would be very common at all, much that people would do things like winstreaks where people beat it with unbroken streaks of winning with every single ship, even the terrible ones.

So making it even more difficult is just a step up.

It's like Battletoads was for platformers.

Granted FTL is difficult but you cannot compare it to Battletoads which is agreeably the most difficult game to beat ever! I tried to beat battletoads on an emulator with the speed down and I still couldn't beat it. FTL I have managed to beat.

Originally posted by luke85:

Granted FTL is difficult but you cannot compare it to Battletoads which is agreeably the most difficult game to beat ever! I tried to beat battletoads on an emulator with the speed down and I still couldn't beat it. FTL I have managed to beat.

Ok gotta give it to you, I never beat Battletoads either.