• Very litte micromanagement -> more time for strategy, tactics, diplomacy.
• No need for logistics. Fuel is not needed, ordnance automatically regenerates and repair units cannot be used.
• Long term ship movements can be planed without any need for fuel considerations.
• Good scanners. Masses of small, hardly visible ships that scan at 300LY distance.
• Extreme growth in middle and especially late game.
• Some very hard to detect big battleships at Tech 7&8 (Drowning, Black), however they can only scan 5LY (Drowning) or not at all (Black).
• Very good in empty galaxies and maps with few players.
• Very strong if allied to another race, but hard to get an ally who allows you to increase Delta Stress to 100. He would be completely dependent on your Base Frequency Seal devices or require masses of HD Stress Dampers. This adds to the 2% GA danger if your base is bigger than 10mio.
• Extremely mobile once tech 9 and especially tech 10 ships are built.
• Fast combat ships.
• Possibility to live on asteroids.
• Much Spy mana and extremely effective ship sabotage missions.
• Extremely good T3 fighter, but very hard to produce these in numbers or even at all.
• A Gate is immune to orbital bombing and naturally very hard to ground assault.
• The Moloch can lay barbitic mines and is automatically restoring 12,500 ordnance per turn. So you can permanently lay maximum size minefields and your resource points probably allow it. Problem is the very low speed of only 35LY/turn and that only the Afterlife can tow this ship. Since you cannot influence where these ships are built (except indirectly via NEPs) you are unable to use this unique ability for attacking unless you have a Gate and the Afterlife.
• It is impossible to rush you. There is just nothing to rush.
• Once you have a Gate on an asteroid you have almost won the game :)

Disadvantages:

• Ships that the Shadow sends against an enemy are completely known. Especially the weapons configuration.
• Totally inflexible ship list. No way to react to weapons configurations of other races.
• No possibility to flee with minions, but to blow up the planet, what is not always possible and quite predictable - especially considering where you're going. Of course you could also try to TNT the base - quite aggressive way of 'fleeing'.
• Very slow growth during about the first 20 turns (because of extremely low starting populations).
• Unable to do any trade with other races, except allowing them to mine and farm your planets.
• No Empires. Just scattered planets. Regions will evolve that try to survive on their own. Each of these regions will be weak compared to other races and they have to try to fight and connect each other.
  No way to 'build' an empire. You have to wish for bases to appear at the right spot and not appear where they only suck up minions that are created by evil acts and get bombed into oblivion a few turns later. NEPs are very useful for creating empires, but come for the price of losing your first big bases.
• No chance in a small galaxy with many players and no ally.
• No way to use any exotic tech ever.
• The only way to sweep mines is the Dice. This ship is very easy to blow up (1 Holo Decoy, 400shields, 100 armor, 43kt hull mass, only 2 blaster cannons). Additionally it has a max speed of only 75LY/turn and cannot be towed by any ships except for the Never-Dawn (tech 9) or the Afterlife (tech 10).
• No defense against hyper jumps. Only Gates get a small grav well.
• Very vulnerable against assault units and fighters in ground assault, because the high Dark Powers of the Shadow do not affect these and combat strength of minions is only 1.
• Most ships are easily to board. Remember Shadow Crew has combat strength 1 and there are never guests. Many early ships are really easy to board and even the bigger ships are still boardable (except for the Afterlife).
• Usual early weapon against fighters is the Sand Caster. If enemy fighters have Sand Caster immunity your only weapon is your T1 fighter. But if the enemy also has Sand Casters your T1 fighters will be killed fast. This is the major problem of the Shadow.
  Should you ever manage to get Afterlifes and their Nemesis Torpedo this gets better, but Gates are very dangerous...
• Photon Torpedoes are very effective against your ships. Only the Dice has one Holo Decoy PD weapon and the Dice is very slow (speed: 75) and easy to blow up. So it will seldom be part of a surprise attack fleet before you have the Afterlife and its Jump Point Generator.
• Unable to build large fleets. The limit of the number of a kind of a ship, depending on the tech level und the number of bases with more then 10k minions, means that you can never have many ships of a higher tech level. This adds to the fact that your 'empire' is usually scattered, which makes it even harder to have ships come together and form a fleet. Furthermore this makes the Shadow having to attack in waves which is very reasonable considering the Sci-Fi background.
• A Gate attracts all enemies. You cannot move it and if the enemies blow up your Base Frequency Seal devices in the orbit, the planet most probably explodes within the next turns and you have lost the game. A Gate on an asteroid is the only way to circumvent this problem. But this is very hard to create by NEPs.
• Very vulnerable to orbital bombing (if the base has less than 50mio minions), super lasers and especially world crushers. Bases with less than 1mio minions are defenseless if they are not, by coincident, in the vicinity of  bigger bases that defend them with their ships.
• Fighters cannot exist without a carrier and cannot fly around on their own.
• Fighters are wasted if their carriers are destroyed. Your major anti-fighter-fighter-carrier, Melted, is very easy to destroy.
• You always spawn a fixed number of ships per turn. Enemies can predict how many ships are in a certain region in early and mid game. In late game they will still have a good guess.
• Enemies can remove HD Stress to make it impossible to ever colonize a planet.
• Almost impossible to colonize planets that have any notable number of Chupanoid natives.
• A pod of 1mio Chupanoids kills any of your big bases (for Gates you need 5mio) in an UNEC. This additionally creates *masses* of Chupanoids - and it will be almost impossible to ever colonize that region of space again. Still you need to secure this area so that your enemies cannot gather all the new Chupanoids and try to go for your Gate(s). It can also lead to a chain reaction if there are several big bases in the area.
  Your only way to avoid a cloaked ship to release such a pod is to either have an ally with tachyon scanners or to live on asteroids.
• NEOs can kill your whole fleet and close your Gates, thus you would loose all Afterlifes.
• By effectively fighting you, your enemies might be given 'The Elders'. This ship is really nasty!