Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk
General:
Liking that each race has either a fleet with a single roiding class and 4 ships to fully cover, or a fleet with 2 roiding classes and 5 ships to fully cover.
Targeting in general looks good too, with only 2 classes targeting themselves. I'm also curious how the targeting of Fi and Bs will work out in practice.
Overall, these stats look very good to me, save for a couple of glaring issue (see below).
Ter:
Pegasus is useless. With my Co fleet, I already have anti-Co, and for anti-De I'd rather use the Hydra for T1. With my Cr fleet, I want anti-Fi and anti-Co, so I want the Harpy there. I'd be more inclined to build it with a Co fleet if it fired T1 De. T2 isn't even necessary.
Cat:
People often underestimate how bad 3-ship roiding fleets are compared to 2-ship ones. It's better to invest extra hard in Scarab than to make any Arachnid at all. That's just how the math works out, even if De is not your primary fleet. The better init on the Arachnid is nearly useless, as the Tula is the only ship that fires at De at init 2, and its ETA is too low for alliance defence anyway. And since the Widow isn't that good anyway, the balance tips even further in favour of just building a ton of Scarab, though I wouldn't advise skipping the Widow too.
Spider suffers from being too slow. Firing at Etd Fi at init 7 just doesn't cut it. And since I don't need to hide my ships from Etd Fi anyway, it's better to build Beetles (which covers 2 of the 3 Co fleets too) and leave them home to flak. I don't see a way for a Fi ship to become useful for Cat at all, to be honest. Either move it to Fr or Cr and change it utterly, or just remove it. Cat has plenty of ships to choose from anyway.
That still doesn't fix the general crappiness of the Cat De fleet, unfortunately, which can roid almost nothing (only Xan Fr for sure, and maybe other Cats or Etd). Viper/Scarab might look good defensively too, but unfortunately Fr and De can only flak each other against Cr. Maybe remove the Arachnid and add a T2 Cr target to the Widow?
While we're talking about Cat anyway, Mantis. You need Widow as anti-Bs in a Cat De fleet, and you want to steal Bs with a Co/Bs setup, and you don't need EMP beyond what little the Scarab provides. Mantis might become a little less crap if Spider became a Cr.
However, my main worry is about the incredible synergy between Zik and Cat. Both races get Co and Bs roiding fleets without any overlap (Zik and Cat Co both cover Fi-Fr and Cat and Zik Bs both cover De-Cr), and EMP/Steal are known to work extremely well together. The fact that Cat has no Co pods is not enough of a handicap. As the stats stand now, I see no reason for any alliance to go anything other than Cat/Zik Co/Bs, with a smattering of Ter Co/Cr to cover the Bs hole. This is the by far the most severe problem with these stats.
Xan:
Xan roids hard, but gets roided hard in return. If XP was still viable, this'd be the XP race. Since we don't, I guess it's fairly middle of the road.
Cr is very strong, but with Xan research, hard to reach, so I feel that balances out. Fr is solid, not too strong, not to weak.
I'm a little worried about both Fr and Cr roiding itself.
Zik:
Cutlass is useless. Zik Co covers Fi/Co on its own, and Zik Fr covers Co on its own, making the Ravager a better choice. Zik can't steal Fi, so maybe moving it to De to kill Fi/Fr or Fr/Fi would be good? That'd help out Zik Fr too, which is pretty weak.
Bs is very strong, even without Cat backup. With Cat backup, the fleet becomes unstoppable (see above), with great faking abilities to boot. I'd be inclined to remove the Bs pod, since Bs is stronger than Co (solo and in team-ups), and both Crook and Bucc steal Bs, providing some opportunity for stealing pods.
Investor and Widow steal each other at same init.
Etd:
Dealer is useless. Etd Fi/De is a great fleet, and building a 6th ship (along with either Investor or Avenger) off-class just to steal some Fi (which you don't want anyway, because Etd has the strongest Fi in the game) seems like a waste to me.
Illuminator is useless because Baliff covers Bs from a roiding class, and I need a T1 anti-De ship anyway.
I don't see a good way to fix these 2 Etd ships. There's such great synergy between Fi and De that it's almost always pointless to build anything other than something to stop De.
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