Here are a couple of thoughts on terrans this round, but one useful piece of information I have been watching the last couple of week is the following:
PT1053
Code:
Race % Race t300 % % dif t100 % % dif
13 cat 38 12.6 -0.3 14 14 +1
20 zik 93 31 +11 38 38 +18
19 xan 74 24.6 +5.6 26 26 +7
28 ter 31 10.3 -17.3 7 7 -21
17 etd 64 21.3 +4.3 15 15 -2
I have been watching the race balance trend as a percentage of the universe for the last month or so and have been doing dumps similar to the one above. What the dumps have been showing is that the percentage of top planets that are terran has been slowly eroding while xan and zik have been increasing and cath and etd remained roughly steady. Interestingly enough as a relative percentage of the universe etd and cath have stayed right about where they should (within a reasonable statistical margin) while the other three have been not. Factors as to why include:
1. Higher percentage of unskilled players choose terran
2. High percentage of skilled players choose zik
3. With terrans being relatively weak Xans have a less problems with BS incommings and therefore are better able to hold onto roids and build large spectre fleets.
4. The stats balance gives etd a strong incentive to build rangers to steal terran BS to have a balanced roiding fleet. Because rangers have a -2 eta bonus defensively they are very powerful against ter relative to the power of syrens/investors against etd
5. Terran DE has become very difficult to attack with late in the round with the large number of banshees in the uni
As a challenge to myself this round I chose to play terran, I have managed (so far at least) to stay in the t200 in a fairly poor galaxy defensively. To do this I have had to basically give up on DE late in the round and focus solely on BS and find an etd to attack with regularly. This combo has allowed me to get lots of XP and so not have to worry so much about my inability to hang onto roids. If I had been able to get decent ally/gal defense and thereby hold onto a few more roids this round my situation would have been significantly different and I believe I could have been in the t100. I point this out not to show my PA skills but to highlight the difficulties with terrans. I have found the killer incomming on me is FI and zik FR, all other incomming I have been able to stop fairly well. So based on this if I could land my DE fleet occasionally I would be in good shape, but because of how poor the terran DE fleet is late in the round I am unable to regain the roids I loose solely with BS. Are these problems surmountable? Obviously one planet has figured out how, probably mostly through good luck. Are the stats tweakable to fix these problems? Probably, but we're not going to find out as we will have a fresh set of stats for r23 by some new people who have hopefully learned from my mistakes.