[Tiamat101]

If you don't have to take your 6m startup resources to get ships, it just gives you more options later, also being able to keep your value 40k lower than 98% of the universe means that you able to hide pretty well. Atleast until you have enough time to get cores done. 8400 Rp is 1200rp less than than magma cores. 8400 Rp is barly a scratch given that you can still do a cores rush, while having access to ships to give you xp lands.

Where as in order for scanners to be useful they must give up the 1st 35 ticks(cath) for jpgs while Terran scanners wont get Au till pt80+ depending on bonus use. This is my point a scanner has to commit the first 2 days + all their startup to get to jpgs and another 40 ticks for AU. While a cov op planet can have ships pt24 ready to attack the same tick and with so many targets at pt24 able to get enough pods to cap 40-50 roids with 1 steal its a totally viable strat.

Even if you just go strait into hulls1 or hct1 you will still have ships attacking for pt24 and if they are cr/bs then you have gotten 2400(hulls1) 4800(hulls2) 7200(hulls3) research esentially for free, which to me is WELL worth the 8400 RP you spent to get it. This strat by all means isnt for everyone however it is still a strat to be put in the same catagory as ter cores + refs Total. Which i did last round. With out even launching an attack I was able to prod myself into a t50 value by pt200 with no risk of being attacking/roided as most of that time i was under 100 roids.

My point I am trying to make is I would like to see non-cath cov opers have to spend upgrade bonus in order to get ship steal by pt24 and honestly i would like to see most of them getting ship steal around pt72 around the same time as scanners get AU scans. As they are equally as useful.

I also want to agree with Berten I think it should be much harder for people to resist cov ops or atleast more expensive. If we honestly want to make this a part of the game then it shouldnt be made useless by pt200 because of guards/sec/pop/gov. You should have to commit a bit harder to keeping yourself protected, such as having some cov ops that cant be blocked if a certain number of agents are used or maybe a cov op that cant be blocked at all like landing scans and unit scans.

As it stands cov ops are the least researched tree in all of PA because of how useless they are after the beginning of the round. However I just want to limit the pt24-pt72 impact of ship steal. That is all. I am open to a lot of ideas but something should be changed.