The thing with exotic weapons is that their production is a lot more limited as it doesn't scale with our overall industry apart from just being really expensive to expand even a small bit.
That leads to the best use of them as you said for "higher" tier troops, but going beyond that for "bespoke" vehicles and ships where we don't really give a shit about the EP costs because EP just fundamentally isn't the bottleneck there.
I think our titans will generally fall into that category also, in part because they will need active AP to create like ships.
For what we want to design first that would be the regular forces not the special ones.
Because so far we have voted at least vehicle design wise for stuff that is intended pretty much 100% for the mass production and use by main forces of our ground forces.
I disagree. Exotics are currently as relatively cheap as they'll ever be, and our forces are the smallest they'll ever be, and it's currently probably the hardest to raise large numbers of troops that it'll ever be.
I think that incentivising making those troops we can raise as effective as we possibly can, using our stock piles of exotics to effectively discount the short term real production cost of those units.
That allows us to get the strongest possible forces for short to medium term AP investment.
Yes, this effectively means we're borrowing production from the future that will be required to refill our stockpiles, but that's, I think, the rational thing to do in our situation where our forces are very small and we have a mission, the Wild Hunt; that we'll want to send forces in and have them seen to perform well.
For example, if the Fata Morgana hull is designed in time I think it would make sense to design an exotic variant using a Starlance and Fateshredder Cannon first (particularly if we can recycle those weapons from our existing vehicles). We then build and deploy those in and armoured detachment on the Wild Hunt.
At some point after our Wild Hunt forces have departed we can then design a version with advanced weapons for our regular forces. One Warrior AP can design multiple vehicles, it seems, so this isn't a prohibitive cost.
It's the same with shock infantry. If we want to send shock infantry detachments along, Fatecaster Rifles in the hands of ithilmar armoured troops should be enormously effective. It would be worth designing a squad based on that concept (with other gear like EDFs and gravity blades) and building a couple of detachments around that.
This same principle applies to other kinds of ground units, I feel.
We wouldn't want to build them in huge numbers, but if we want to ever build them it makes to front load construction of them, for the reasons I stated above. To recap:
Exotic stockpiles are essentially saved production. We can spend it to reduce the effective immediate cost of building something. That means that we can get a more powerful force in a shorter amount of time than we can with non-exotic weapons. When we're on a deadline, like with the Wild Hunt, that's important.
While our forces are small the relative benefit of each additional unit is magnified. Adding an exotic armed unit makes more of a difference now than adding that exotic armed unit in the future, while the relative cost of an exotic armed unit will increase as our BAP total increases. As a result it makes sense to front load any production of exotic armed units to now and build non-exotic armed units later.
That's what we're effectively doing with our refits, where we're choosing to spend the exotics stockpile embodied in our own existing ships on their upgraded versions.
I think we should be doing the same with our ground troops, spending our exotics stockpile on the squads and vehicles that we'll be using in the short term.
I emphasise that this is a short term strategy. Once we have a small number of war hosts equipped like that we should transition to using advanced weapons for our regular forces that we then build up.
same as heavy -> naval): 1 close-in las lance, 1 close in grav-vibration, 1 close-in grav-imploder