Whats the most Challenging????

maru,coll, and then guard mainly for tb though cause k class will be a pain. But yea can be hard getting a decent income for maru just need to plunder everythig until ya win something nice

I`d probably have to go with marauder first and then guard. I only play turn based though.

Starbases are horribly overrated.
They have bad hull/pr they have worse weapon/pr, their modifiers are typically average for their races, and their damage is often spread over three weapon categories. For a ships that take so long to research, and are only defensive, they are the worst "defensive" ship designed for defense in the game). Plus their range is not that great, they usually are out ranged by the ships that they are actually weak to.

Even the lovely A.Miner ships, with 10 range, that are weak to missiles. God the old days were fun, oh look a miner spam missiles "yay I won, because your ships are bad, and your starbases are weak to missiles. Of course you Lakko`s fired first but they used up all their PR on that 13 range so they did no actual damage.

Maru and collective have probably the best two sets of race ships in the game. Virals don`t count because they have 2 good ships, 1 amazing ship, and the best of Maru, Terran and A. Miner.

They make money on food, which given the tax virals and miners gives them good money generation.

The biggest down side is if you do not play consistently, they are arguably harder, since you will never have good planets, and your home world will never be good, because if it was you would be killed completely.
That being said they have their places in some stacks.

nope coll and marduer are easy i think guardian u have to stay in dp for ever researching jsut to make 1 cent then u can really only keep planet 1000 land and plaunder most everything else plus there ships sux ;) maruder and coll are very easy there ships rock and low upkeep plus witht he food prices right now its easy to make money m8

It depends a lot on the server i think. At RT i have a feeling miners is the hardest race for fighting, but the easiest to get an income with. So if you are fighting a lot at low PR miners are crab at RT. You can always sit in DP and generate income with any race if you want, so money shouldn`t be an issue for any race at RT. And since you got all the turns in the world at RT the build rate isn`t very important either.

At turnbased servers its a different story. Collectives and marus are probably the hardest races there, followed by terrans and then miners.