Different enemies with different animations

Hi, I'm building a space shooter similar to Galaga and Space Invaders but I'm having trouble setting up the animations for my enemies.

What I want to achieve is spawning a group of enemies of different types and all of them using the same animation, and the same group can be cloned but it can use a different animation set
Now lots of ideas came into my mind but I don't know what's best and mostly important which one is more scalable

My solutions:

First
Creating a bunch of animation clips and providing each enemy with a Legacy Animation, then from my SpawnManager set the required animation or a random one to all the enemy spawned in group

Second
Creating a single controller and a bunch of animations, each enemy is equipped with the controller and the spawn manager simply sets the current state to the Animator which plays the right animation

Third
Doing every animation as a script and then adding one of the scripts to the enemy object

Is there any other solution? Should I use one of the above?

 

If all you enemies have the same animation states, blending settings and transitions then you could look into using animator override controllers for each.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AnimatorOverrideController.html

if enemies have different states and transitions then you’re probably better off with unique animator controllers.

 

I didn't know about this, thanks I will surely check it out!