[Gate]

I think caths will struggle this round; they can't hurt FR/DE fleets and have awful EMP against at least one of them. There's also some nasty defence against them (spectres/thief/cutlass) and I feel cath are the weakest race. So they need to pick their fleet very carefully!


If anyone sees a way of making them tougher, please do share: after some thinking I came up with a suggested fleet of locust/roach/scarab/mantis.

As always, it's better to pick a single attack fleet early, and build it all round long. IMO, the cruiser (CR) fleet is probably better than the corvette (CO) fleet. If you buy a CO fleet, then you have to spend lots of your resources on beetles eg up to a third of your res on anti FI/CO. This leaves 2/3rds for anti FR/DE/CR/BS.

If you go CR, you can spend a few of your resources on mantis and be avoided by FI/CO all round long. You should have enough mantis (or 'potential mantis', ie stockpiled resources) to do enough damage to make you an ugly target, which depends on your roids & value. This should only take up 10% or so of your resources, so you have 90% to spend on anti FR/DE/CR/BS - much better!

Spectres could ruin you, so an etd/ter attack partner will probably be required later on. And I'd build scarab/roach as your attack fleet, locust as your ally def, and mantis as self/galdef.

ATTACKING: etd & caths without locust are your targets. With a terran or etd you can hit xand/zik too. Note you don't really need tarantula; they're only useful vs dragons, which should be rare in defence. The loss of tara isn't bad for your attack.

DEFENDING: Scarab/tarant fleets could be raped by CR all round, whilst loc/scarabs will be avoided. Locusts are also better than tara against terran BS: they beat wyvern 1-on-1 and if a terran fleet is big enough to wipe out your locs then it's big enough to bash through an equally sized tarantula fleet. The only thing tarants are better against are etd CR/BS, but there's not many etds and if they don't build many pillager then locusts are better anyway!