Morpher Tricks (cf. morpher mechanics)

• Cheap substitute for more expensive ships that have higher build, maintenance, and fuel costs. For instance, a morpher emulation of an engineer, stargate, or jumpgate may be cheaper than the real thing. Other emulated ship types may also prove economical, depending on the exact series settings.
• Cheap substitute for planning. By bringing a morpher with your fleet, you gain more flexibility in situations that are difficult to anticipate. For instance, due to the random effects of battle, you may lose all the ships of some critically important type (e.g. minesweeper, or perhaps engineer, depending on your situation and plans). With a morpher or two present, you can quickly replace such casualties.
• Bait and switch. What do you do when your opponent presents you with massive fleet of attack ships but no minesweeper? Build a minefield and maybe a few sats, right? That's the reason this trick works so well. Some of the attacks are actually morphers, and they turn into sweepers on the same turn that the others nuke the system. Ouch.
• Putting a stationary ship in places where you cannot build (e.g. an allied, enemy, unoccupied, or annihilated system):
  • Minefield — great for causing surprise explosions on enemy systems. On both Stargate and Lugdunum, this is best achieved if you can conceal the fact that you have morphers. In other words, don't change directly from a "morpher" to a "minefield". On Stargate, this is because the morpher is visible to other players as a morpher, and should be changed to something else before the other players can see it. On Lugdunum, the reason is that changing straight to minefield allows the other player to see the minefield one turn before it can explode.
  • Jumpgate — not one, but two devastating applications:
    • Daisy chaining — if all of the worthwhile targets are outside of jumpgate range, you can assemble a series of jumpgates whose terminus is within range of something desirable. If the chain is constructed correctly, any ships at the ultimate origin can be transported all the way to the final destination in a single turn.
    • The Tempo Trick — if you have a jumpgate present as part of your attacking fleet, then your fleet can nuke one system and be transported to a new target on the same turn. The fleet can nuke another target on the very next turn, without wasting any orders on movement.
• Harrasment (on Lugdunum) — morph from cloaker to some aggressive ship type and then immediately back to cloaker. The ship will be immune to combat throughout this process, which can be repeated at irregular intervals. This may serve as a decoy, or a genuine attack, perhaps by changing to minefield, or giving a nuke order backed by true cloakers.
• The unkillable ship (on Lugdunum) — a variant of Harrassment. What the opponent sees is a ship that just won't die. It's actually a pair of morphers in opposite phases. As one turns into a visible ship, the other turns into a cloaker. Only one is visible at a time, and neither enters combat (until a time of the owner's choosing, of course).