Strictly speaking, theyre quite decent as AR equivalents and I sometimes wonder how SF never won. Honestly they have passable all-round performance.

Practically speaking their skill is awful and you have other options, so raising them is kind of a waste unless you already have lots of everything else

Hot art (Why dont we get their proper portraits Mica? The damned Aegis do), a big gun, decent performance, low cost, no frills. She's a DPS unit that deals damage. Decent Firepower, High Acc,... surprisingly good evasion for a DPS. The skill she gets is pretty much what SWAP Jaegers torture players with. Also punches through some armor.

Good general purpose if you have room in the team.

The strongest single-enemy killer in SF, get her if you can. If you want a boss dead, she can probably AFK solo it. Yes, she can 1v1 Yegor while you're jacking off to something else entirely. For this reason, her best buddies are Manticores - both for taking down pesky minor mobs with their powerful AoE attacks, and because of their skill synergy with her - their debuff works for her skills.

Your primary armored DPS that isn't a Manticore. In most cases, a Manticore is scarier, but these guys have consistent output and are also armored. And unlike Manticores, you get all 5. You can think of them as armored Jaegers that do better vs high HP enemies and same-ish or worse vs. lower HP enemies.

The big thing about them is their skills. They get bonus damage based on how much max HP a target has, and they can drive their own crit rate up as they keep firing.

They do however, apparently have defective targeting systems, so you NEED something else like a Jaeger to provide range, because otherwise they're kind of not going to spot anything to shoot.

Probably the closest to a top-end all-rounder. It has armor. It has good stats. It withstands AoEs really well due to being a single unit, and it has two very nice skills.

Now the big thing that is unlike enemy Hydras, your Manticores only have 30 armor. However, they pack the same short range explosive blast hydras do (And they have 500+ base attack power so it'll hurt masses of light enemies when they do it), and uniquely, a pushback skill with a 10 second cooldown that reduces enemy movement speed and rate of fire.

Not always the best solution, but it's the true waifu of the game.

AKA Dogmom. The Crazy Dinergate lady. The weirdo. The Ringleader who gets her head blown off in the mango version of the game before she actually gets to do anything.

Her skills are focused on throwing wave after wave after wave of dinergates at people and somehow making it stick. Good for mass warfare, or overwhelming things that cant shoot very much and have no AoE attacks.

TBH I'm not convinced she is really worth the effort to train, but there's a certain boss in Mirror Stage EX that she trivializes, so if you're into raising an entire unit just to kill one specific enemy...

Her skill is hit or miss (+damage early in the fight, though its a BIG number so it can be worth it) but her big thing is just continuous DPS. Unlike G&K MGs, she never runs out of ammo. Otherwise, quite similar to G&K MGs with basic AP loads. Surprisingly low cost too.

1 downside is she mostly gets replaced by her SWAP version.

The armor helps it a bit, even if its Evasion is lower compared to the unarmored Dinnergates. Its low HP is an issue, but it's surprisingly decent as a tank, and its damage is actually not bad. Also, its extra swarms are actually not bad either. The really big issue is it's a 2-star unit, so have fun getting finished ones done.

The SWAP Striker has higher offensive stats, better multipliers, and notably higher accuracy than the base version, so it can actually hit things. The main downside to this is it costs 6 instead of 4 to put into your echelon.

Almost across the board, it's an improvement for the Vespid. However, its a pain to get a full formation of them because its a 2 star base unit, and as a DPS unit you want it at full stacks. Also, it's not really significantly better than stuff like Jaegers and Strikers. They're not useless, but there are just much better SF units to spend effort and slot points on.