[Banned]

Originally Posted by Gate

Personally, I would pick terran from the current list. My fleet would consist of gryphons, drakes, pegs, chimeras, wyverns and dragons. With this, I should not really be attacked by:
Terran DE - gryphons
Xan FR - Wyverns
Zik FI - drakes
Zik DE - gryphons

No harpies for alliance defence?

I think your choice is sound though. At the moment I also feel Terran is too powerful.

All of these being effective 0 loss defence. Of the other attack fleets, I wouldn't be particularly worried either.

The problem, in my opinion, is that 3 of these don't make alliance eta. I'm entertaining the thought of moving the harpy/phoenix configuration back to FI->FI and CO->CO respectively (and having the drake be CO->FR or FR->FR), or making the drake CO->FI. Nothing solid here yet, but watch this space etc. The Gryphon will definitely be staying as is, with possible armor/damage tweaks.

Terran BS would be risking losses against my own dragons, and so would be unlikely to attack me.
Xan CO gets massacred by pegs. The damage of pegs may be low, but both xand-CO have just 33 arm:cost, making them easy to slaughter. Besides which, the fireblade is not a particularly tempting ship from the xand point of view, in terms of mass production, only a handful are needed to dissuade zik attackers.
Cath FR requires FI, CO and DE backup. The tzen does nasty damage to this fleet, not to mention that a huge amount of EMP vessels are needed to stun their way through terran armour.
Cath CR suffers nasty losses to chimera before it can shoot. If there are no good cath, xand or zik targets left for CR, I would surmise that there are not many big caths, leading on to them not having as much value as me, leading to them not having enough roach to feel safe in attacking me.

I think this is a mostly correct assesment. The only disagreement I have is that early and mid-game, Terran won't have enough resources to spend on all this firepower. By mid-game small terran targets will be nigh unhittable and by late games large ones will be as well.

The BS look quite excellent. 60 dmg:cost for BS EMP is a joke IMO and makes black widows pretty much completely useless as we saw round 13. Caths simply can't afford to spend more on widows than terrans can spend on BS.

But since they're not targeted, the BW population is likely to grow (unlike r13 when they were usually toasted daily). As for the d:c ratio, I haven't fine tuned that yet, I just eyeballed it in favor of Terran. I'm aiming for about 1.3:1 value BW:BS to completely freeze all Levs. Of course with the current Lev config, that ratio means wild swings from 1.2:1. I may have to give it up

Meanwhile, with a decent investment in BS, ziks too are quite an easily viable target, as I wonder how much they will invest in frigates. The only ships guaranteed to cause damage to a terran BS fleet are broadswords and dragons, neither of which are likely to stop terran BS fleets efficiently. From r13 stats, the dragon has seen a slight increase in armour and damage, whilst the broadsword (then the peacekeeper) has seen a reduction.

Again, I haven't fine-tuned this yet, but I expect Ter BS will have a decent period of free roids on Xan.

Thanks for the post, it was most insightful.

Originally Posted by Bromcrysal

There are only 5 ship-types that target BS, and a Terran BS fleet will target 4 of these, Dragon, Broadsword, Corsair and Rogue. And it will even shoot first against Corsair and Rogue. The other, Black Widow, is an EMP ship.

I've 'got plans' for the Rogue, it definitely won't stay as-is. One option is to improve init on it, so it basically forces Ter away from Wyvern only fleets when hitting Zik.

And with the increased armor across the board for Terran ships, these are even less of a threat than Roach ->DE last round. The only viable defence against a Terran BS fleet is the Broadsword... and if History can be trusted, most Xan players won't even finish researching ship hulls until halfway through the round. A possible solution would be to turn the roach to shoot at Battleships, like the Widowmaker last round, but that opens the Catharran to the Zik. But however it's done, i think there needs to be a little more anti-BA

I'm inclined to agree. I'd say that as Monroe pointed out, we have too much anti-CR, so a good candidate for change would be an anti-CR ship of some sort.

This doesn't even take into account the Terran DE fleet, which is still powerful, tho not as tough as last round. And I understand the desire to give us poor Terrans a fast ship, but the Pegasus is just too fast this time. It's the only innitiative 3 in the game, the first Normal ship to shoot. We Terrans don't like being slow, but we understand it. That's why we have all the armor. If you move Pegasus to init 4, it would shoot at the same time as Fireblade. This would make it just as viable on defence to a Terran, 'cause it would kill just as many corvettes, but it would limit it a little bit on attack against Xan, whose only defence against DE will be those poor fireblades, until they complete research of ship hulls.

Yeah, I'm going to have to reexamine this, moving init to 4 and increasing armor on the peg and chim fixes a few other issues as well.

Of course, it's entirely possible that I don't know what I'm talking about

On the contrary, I think you're sound on all points.

Originally Posted by sniborp

Playing the first beta was rather pointless. Value bug, too few people amongst others.

Yeah, the first beta was completely useless. I haven't gotten on IRC yet, so I don't know if the value bug is being fixed, but I hope so :\

Zik needs a complete overhall i feel since no zik dominated like they usually do in speedgames, suggesting that it is tougher than usual to steal ships.

If the beta was pointless, let's not draw any conclusions from it, shall we?

For example last round, ghosts had weak armour, so whoring marauders was effective, with this set of stats, whoring say buccs was a bad thing since gryphons have high armour, pks nuke them, and even roaches are fairly good against them.

I think this is mostly right. There have been some strong opinions about Zik having any 'low eta ships that hit higher eta ships'.

The problem is that I've essentially painted myself into a corner (which is inevitable with stats, I'm quite sure I could prove mathematically that it's impossible to make a balanced set of stats, given a few rules to define what balanced is). Neither CR nor BS can hit the other at the moment: it would give Zik 0-loss ship gains at alliance ETA or same class stealers. Both are big, big no-nos. So anti-CR and BS must be in other classes. Viable classes are FR and DE for anti-CR, and FR for BS. To change this would mean changing the roiding fleets, which means changing the defenses against them which means lots of work, which is inevitably going to end up with the same problems.