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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 or science, 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. A variant substitutes cloakers for some or all of the attacks.
• 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. 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". First, in a system the enemy cannot see, change the morpher to something relatively innocuous, like an attack. Then bring the ship into position and change from "attack" to "minefield".
  • Jumpgate — several possible applications:
    • Daisy Chain — if all of the worthwhile targets are outside of normal jumpgate range, you can assemble a series of jumpgates whose terminus is within range of something desirable. You can use the slow but sure method (one hop per turn), or up the risk a little by giving a chain of jump orders in the same turn. The jumpgates will execute the jumps in a random sequence. If you get lucky, the ships traverse the chain in a single turn. If you don't get lucky, your fleet ends up at one of the intermediate stepping stones, and you've taken "jumpgate loss" for orders further down the chain that didn't achieve anything.
    • 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. Ideally, the fleet can nuke one target per turn, without wasting any orders on movement. This potentially doubles the force that the fleet is capable of projecting over time.
    • Escape a Doomwall — let's say you need to jump ships out of a large annihilated area. A morpher-jumpgate (or morpher-stargate) is the only way you can achieve this.
• Self-Preserving Ships — you have fleet with morphers in the mix. The effects of battle are supposed to target ships at random, but it would be nice if there were a way to make sure that the morphers are never chosen. There is. Turn them into minefields or carriers. Both are immune (or nearly so) to the DEST phase of combat (the one that randomly targets ships). Neither can be destroyed unless you lose the entire fleet. Carriers are preferred if you have that tech (since they actually absorb some of the damage that would otherwise destroy them), but minefields might do if you don't need movement capability and don't mind the risk of explosion.
• Filtering Effects — you have a stargate or a jumpgate and a mixture of morphers and normal ships there. You want to jump some ships to a distant system, but you want some ships to stay behind, remaining in the same system as the gate. So, change the morphers into stationary ships (probably satellites or minefields, or even another gate).