Quite frankly, the claim that giving races a steal ship changes their fundamental identity is ludicrous. Such an identity can only be expressed in terms of how they impact the way the races are played, yet all races are played the same way. You launch, calc, land or recall, then repeat. You pick targets in the same way, you calc in the same way. Yeah, the combat works out a little differently
This lack of differentiation is reflected in the way people pick races. 340 people who have played more than 20 rounds under the same nick since Etd was introduced, up to r61. Here's the breakdown in the number of races each of those people played:
Code:
| Races played | Number of people |
|--------------+------------------|
| 1 | 6 |
| 2 | 5 |
| 3 | 23 |
| 4 | 66 |
| 5 | 240 |
Only 10% of those people have played 3 or fewer races over their career. Of those 340 people, 83 play the same race at least 50% of the time, and 28 at least 75% of the time. Imperial is the champion of diversity, playing 4 races 22% of the time each and Ter 13%.
Of the 11 people who play the same race at least 90% of the time, we have 3 Ters (MD, SpaceLegend, MarkB), 4 Cats (Evil_Dooms, Kallysandra, Spritfire, DigitalZero), 1 Xan (Epcylon), 3 Ziks (Ace, Dunkelgraf, bird) and 0 Etds. All of them picked another race at most twice.
This indicates that the vast majority of people feel that the differences between the races are superficial and/or unimportant, and use other metrics to decide what race to pick from round to round, such as ally strat.
I'd also argue that the races are not really that different with 1 steal ship. Cat non-EMP ships are historically underbuilt, Ter is the race most like Zik. That leaves Xan, which apparently few people are a diehard fan of anyway, which is weird, considering it usually outperforms all other races.
As for that old thread, it was hilarious, thanks for the link. I was kind of angry at/all the time!