[Gate]

Played round 10-now in ND. From peon, through to BC, DC, internal/external affairs officer, attacks HC, and have ran pretty much all departments of the ally at HC level at one point or another.

Race history; I started off as a bit of a noob, but round 13-now I've grappled with the shipstats a lot more and generally pick what looks to me to be the strongest race. If given a choice, I like to go xandathrii as they are generally teh toughest nut to crack. They generally mean I get less incs (when I get random incs, they used to be cath CR, stunners, so if I couldn't get online my fleet survived). Also, they can endlessly fake frigates and draw up defence, helping my alliance out a lot.

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

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

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.

In terms of attacking. I would hit some caths early with my destroyers, and would, later round, use them to roid some caths and the ziks I wanted to if needed, thugh I would tend to keep them home for chimera defence purposes. 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. 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.

Basically, I would pick terrans as there is no way to roid them without using a large combo, or risking heavy losses, whilst they have a reasonably effective DE fleet, and a BS fleet which is going to be nearly impossible to stop, particularly as it can be faked very easily and each BS fleet will require a lot of defence. There is nothing like the round 13 pirate or the round 14 rogue to keep terran big ship attack fleets at bay either, so I would consider them overpowered.