Cathaar - Ratios?

[-QS-]

Well, as I will go cathaar and never played them before, I`d like you to suggest some ratios for ship building.
I will definitly only go for spider, beetle, roach, BW. So, I thought of about building any ships nearly equally (resource). Watcha think?

[TheSeeker]

i usually try to have as much crystal roids as possible (in beginning) because later in round your ratio always drops. But a cathaar doesnt need THAT much crystal, a 1:1 ratio is more then enough. tho the excess crystal is always nice to dump in spiders (in my opinion) if you however have a 1,5:1 ratio it is good managable too, and if worse, try to trade some crystal, or just buy more beetles / roaches which are fairly nice metal sinks.

[mens]

I think he meant ship ratios (?)
If I go cathaar I will probably also make only those ships.
(maybe some guards late game)
But dunno about the ratio yet tho =\

[TheSeeker]

argh you are right mens....

well, i never really make ratio´s for ships to be honest, just check what i need most at the giving time.

just build your spiders, beetles in early ticks, rush for blackwidows.... buy a good amount of them with some saved up resources (if you saved some up).

this is the stage where you should grown very quickly, with your beetle, blackwidow and pods fleet (spiders can be added)

then, just wait and let someone who´s rushing for DE tell you when he´s almost done
buy a **** load of roaches, and carry on.

[isildurx]

ill give it a shot.


id build something like:

Beetle: 100k
Roach: 40-50k
BW: 25k
Spider: Rest of the crystal shud be like 20-40k


P.S It kinda depends what the universe goes.

if terran, build roach, if xan build beetles etc.


P.S I only thought bout this 4 like 2mins :|

[-QS-]

Originally posted by isildurx

P.S I only thought bout this 4 like 2mins :|

but it gives me a feeling/ idea, so thx a lot!

[Sun_Tzu]

I have to agree with isil and seeker, seekers starting strat should do good, and the ratios have to be based on what the uni looks like, you'll know when you start attacking anyways.

[mens]

For people going tullas I'd build lots of spiders for being able to use tarantulas T3-all for stopping BS, without having to stop fi/co with the T3.
eeehh, did you get that?
sorry about the poor wording

[Cochese]

Originally posted by mens
For people going tullas I'd build lots of spiders for being able to use tarantulas T3-all for stopping BS, without having to stop fi/co with the T3.
eeehh, did you get that?
sorry about the poor wording

Made sense to me

What mens was trying to say is, T3=all results in shots being wasted on fighters and corvettes unless your spiders already froze them, in which case your Tarantulas will be freezing more important targets, or at least someting other than FI/CO.

[Sun_Tzu]

still using a t3=all to target bs is a *VERY* long shot, though then again, BS isn't that common and if you really get trouble get your gal-m8s to send some dragons.

[-QS-]

Originally posted by Sun_Tzu
still using a t3=all to target bs is a *VERY* long shot, though then again, BS isn't that common and if you really get trouble get your gal-m8s to send some dragons.

yeah Sun_Tzu, BS are not too common and if you get incs from em you can get galdef...

if terran go with wyvern/pegs, you can send away your bw anyway

[Muzzinator]

i don't really like spiders.. i find bw/beetles much more effective. they are useful as a crystal sink though..

[Ellep]

Originally posted by Muzzinator
i don't really like spiders.. i find bw/beetles much more effective. they are useful as a crystal sink though..

try send BWs with eta 6 universe ;-)

Sometimes people need help against the very fast Xan attacks and for that Spiders are a must have.

[TheSeeker]

Originally posted by Muzzinator
i don't really like spiders.. i find bw/beetles much more effective. they are useful as a crystal sink though..

you might be true about bw´s being more effective yes,

but in first stage of the game, you will have to make spiders for a start, and roid with beetles, spiders and pods.

then after a good 150 or even more ticks you can start making your blackwidows.

What i also like about the spider that it already takes on some Co before the BW shoots, this means the BW can focuss more on FR ships.

[Sun_Tzu]

you are all right, bw's are more effective than spids yet spids do have a important role as a c-sink and as low-eta defence and an early-on attack weapon. However, I was counting the number of worth-while co ships out there yesterday and I can only name 2 I really think will be seen in masses; Vultures and Roaches. This means the co-targeting of the spid will not be required so often and it doesn't hurt as much that the bw targets fr as second. And due to the new c/p eta's even the bw can be used for defence.

[dabult]

Originally posted by isildurx
ill give it a shot.


id build something like:

Beetle: 100k
Roach: 40-50k
BW: 25k
Spider: Rest of the crystal shud be like 20-40k


P.S It kinda depends what the universe goes.

if terran, build roach, if xan build beetles etc.


P.S I only thought bout this 4 like 2mins :|

You can roid me any time of the week with those fearsome pods

[MAdnRisKy]

spid = more efficient than widow at co.

just so you all know, and if you're sending beetles then there;'s no reason to hold off on spids now is there

[Sun_Tzu]

yes there is, the lack of good co-class ships in the uni for instance. Besides, if you wanna crunch number then the scorp is the best anti-co ship around, I still don't see that many people attacking with it though.

[isildurx]

Originally posted by dabult
You can roid me any time of the week with those fearsome pods

:|

[Domin]

Originally posted by Sun_Tzu
yes there is, the lack of good co-class ships in the uni for instance. Besides, if you wanna crunch number then the scorp is the best anti-co ship around, I still don't see that many people attacking with it though.

That's because not manny went cath and far fewer went eta 9 but i know some who made top 100 with eta 9 fleets.

eek yes it is possible but you need to know what you are dooing

[hAl]

Originally posted by Sun_Tzu
I was counting the number of worth-while co ships out there yesterday and I can only name 2 I really think will be seen in masses; Vultures and Roaches. This means the co-targeting of the spid will not be required so often and it doesn't hurt as much that the bw targets fr as second.

People attacking with vultures will do so with mass campany of arrowheads and bombers. Those are likely to be build far more then vultures.

hAl

[Sun_Tzu]

Originally posted by hAl
People attacking with vultures will do so with mass campany of arrowheads and bombers. Those are likely to be build far more then vultures.

hAl

doesn't mean they are good, just a forced thing since you can't send the armor-weak vultures withour flak and besides, I still have bw don't I? I can't see many xandas wasting their eta7 on adding fr into that fleet and even if they did a decent amount of bw should freeze more than well whatever co there is around and then target fr class, if really needed to.

spiders 1 gun 1.25k ress, bw 5 gun 7.5k ress (which is 5*spider's ress)

means spider/bw are same on co

spiders die faster, have eta 2 (therefore good for def)
bw's target fr, spiders don't

i have used spiders in r7 when i was cath but wouldn't use them again, except as a crystal sink maybe

their only use is defense (low eta) against xandr or to attack a cath with scarabs in the early game (scarabs will get freezed before they can shoot)....

that's all

[Ultimate Newbie]

i'd be going for a Beetle/BW/Tarant/Pod/Mantis fleet in about this resoruce ratio:

20% / 25% / 40% / 10% / 5%

perhaps more Beetles/BW and less pdos though (maybe less Mantis too) depending on M:C ratio. ie, if i have lots of M, more Beetles. lots of C, more tarants

So are Scarabs pretty much useless?

[Ants]

They are ok at stopping Fr early on and with them being -1 eta from BW they are good alliance defence. But I would not buy any.

how come?


they target both Co & Fr's?

[Moondoggie]

spiders 1 gun 1.25k ress, bw 5 gun 7.5k ress (which is 5*spider's ress)

Clearly you didn't pass your math class.

Spider cost = 1250, for one shot
or
1250 * 5 = 6250 for 5 shots

BW cost = 7500 for 5 shots

6250 < 7500, meaning spider is more efficient at freezing co than the black widow.

Spiders are great in def, and during the attack its good to send enough of them to freeze all or most of the co, so your black widows can fire on their more efficient T2, frigates.

Scorpions will rarely make it through all the fighters to fire on corvettes.

----

Scarabs are pretty much useless once BW have been researched. BW are more efficient at freezing fr, and spiders are more efficient vs co. Better to save on scarabs and build roaches. De are much more numerous than fr are.

----

In my opinion, the cath kill ships are always overlooked.

The widowmaker is even better at killing certain fighters (fighters with 4-5 armor) than the mighty pegasus is.

The guardian is one of the most damaging ships in the game. This hulk smashes through defenses and PDS like butter.

The defender is the only < eta 8 ship that specifically targets battleships. It is great vs the weakly armored wyvern, and fires before it.

The avenger is heavily amored and has decent fire power too.

----

The fighters and such are all great of course too. Before I focused too much on one ship, I'd see what the universe is like.

[hyfe]

Originally posted by Moondoggie

The widowmaker is even better at killing certain fighters (fighters with 4-5 armor) than the mighty pegasus is.

The guardian is one of the most damaging ships in the game. This hulk smashes through defenses and PDS like butter.

The defender is the only < eta 8 ship that specifically targets battleships. It is great vs the weakly armored wyvern, and fires before it.

The Widowmaker might be good in theory; however its just one of those things that never works out in practice..
1.Bad initative
2.Annoying habit of dying
3.You must invest alot in them to have enough to really make an impact.

Guardian; Yes..also good in theory.. has a good set of stats.. however having built emp-fleet the first half of the round; its damn hard to build up enough Guardians to actually matter suddenly. Granted; they might be a viable strategy if you have a couple of k's of roids and then loose your fleet..but if that happens often your having more important problems than deciding what ships to build

About the defender; .. sure.. its ok..But how often do you really need specific BS targetting? I haven't since r5 atleast. "Take care of the pods and the problems go away" .. Besides; when sending defence: it always ends up with a DC deciding between stun all / kill enough. There is no middle way between these..offering a fleet with 3k roaches and 2k protectors will just make him stare at you; the fleet doesn't fit in anywhere...

[Moondoggie]

The Widowmaker might be good in theory; however its just one of those things that never works out in practice..
1.Bad initative
2.Annoying habit of dying
3.You must invest alot in them to have enough to really make an impact.

I had about 300 of them in beta. They worked in a astropod based fleet and in a cruiser based fleet. They don't die any faster than pegs do. They are good in adding bite to your attacks. They wont slow down any fleet you send, or stick out all that much either.

Guardian; Yes..also good in theory.. has a good set of stats.. however having built emp-fleet the first half of the round; its damn hard to build up enough Guardians to actually matter suddenly. Granted; they might be a viable strategy if you have a couple of k's of roids and then loose your fleet..but if that happens often your having more important problems than deciding what ships to build

A few guardians is more than enough. In my cruiser fleet, I had 100 of these and the damage I was doing as cath was absurd. The tulas froze a lot of the def, while the avengers flak'ed the mantis. I could max cap with minimal loss, while dealing decent damage myself. And having some of these at home will really make people think twice about attacking you. With quicker cluster and parallel travel time, these can make a huge difference.

A lot of people have grown up in this game thinking they should only build a few different ships to have the best fleet to handle one situation. Like pegasus defense for example. Or to just build a frigate based fleet, or a crusier fleet. I say get both. Even if a cath did nothing but build roaches and tarantulas, a bigger terran would still get through. And if you focused too much on de defense, xan fighters will hit you, or zik frigates. The point is that you will always need defense when you get attacked, so why not build a diverse fleet so you have more options available when attacking, and while defending your mates?

You can't always take care of the pods. There are other ways to make the attacker recall, like damaging his fleet. Wyverns have very low armor for their cost. If a lot of ships start firing at them, the attacker will take such losses that he would be an idiot not to recall. They also hit cruisers, and even destroyers. Which happens to be the three ship classes that terran attack with.

[hyfe]

Originally posted by Moondoggie
I had about 300 of them in beta. They worked in a astropod based fleet and in a cruiser based fleet. They don't die any faster than pegs do. They are good in adding bite to your attacks. They wont slow down any fleet you send, or stick out all that much either.

Getting a decent cap-rate is difficult as it is already without widowmakers and fi/fr fleets. Damn impossible with a fair numbers of widowmakers if you ask me.. And i'm not to fond of sending them in a seperate fleet either.

A few guardians is more than enough. In my cruiser fleet, I had 100 of these and the damage I was doing as cath was absurd. The tulas froze a lot of the def, while the avengers flak'ed the mantis. I could max cap with minimal loss, while dealing decent damage myself.

Well..then there is the that whole issue about ETA. ETA 9 attacking is pretty much unusable in regular PA imo. Because, whatever your sending, somebody's who sending only kill fleet will be more scarier than you. So being the least scariest and having eta 9 leaves you kinda in a dump .. Although; Granted, they work for in-cluster bashing; but we don't do that do we?

And having some of these at home will really make people think twice about attacking you. With quicker cluster and parallel travel time, these can make a huge difference.

Having bored unused fleet at home sure makes a difference yes. I'd say build them if your entrenching yourself. Stay away if not.

...The point is that you will always need defense when you get attacked, so why not build a diverse fleet so you have more options available when attacking, and while defending your mates?

Yes; so by building the right ships; you help out your defence. If your going to defend by emp'ing all the ships; killers are a waste. If your going to defend by hurting the attacker; emp's are a waste. (if your planning on not using emp-ships; you've choosen the wrong race)

You can't always take care of the pods. There are other ways to make the attacker recall, like damaging his fleet. Wyverns have very low armor for their cost. If a lot of ships start firing at them, the attacker will take such losses that he would be an idiot not to recall. They also hit cruisers, and even destroyers. Which happens to be the three ship classes that terran attack with.

As i mentioned earlier: When arranging defense, the most efficient way of doing it is usually either:
1. Freezing everything
2. Kill enough to make attacker recall

Freezing half the fleet, and killing some of it won't make him recall. Quite alot of people will take medium losses and full roid cap

Which is why; I'd say 'kill ships defending a cath is a waste of resources in 95% of the cases'.

[MAdnRisKy]

If a cat freezes most of the incomming ships, (which he will uless the attcker ent over the cap) then actually you don't need much kill defence to make sure he doesn't get anything anyway

[-QS-]

Originally posted by Moondoggie

A lot of people have grown up in this game thinking they should only build a few different ships to have the best fleet to handle one situation. Like pegasus defense for example. Or to just build a frigate based fleet, or a crusier fleet. I say get both. Even if a cath did nothing but build roaches and tarantulas, a bigger terran would still get through. And if you focused too much on de defense, xan fighters will hit you, or zik frigates. The point is that you will always need defense when you get attacked, so why not build a diverse fleet so you have more options available when attacking, and while defending your mates?

The necessity of building other ships than only anti-def comes from attackin dude Unless u don`t want to go for terran only (which will be hard late round cause of wyvern + dragon (if a lot cath-BS-CR around))...

In general you are sucessfuller in pa if you concentrate on your strength. Tactics like "a lil bit of all" do not work well. That is why you have to decide if you go cath, imo:

you build FI/CO/FR or CR/BS

if you go CR/BS you have to add some small ships for your alliance, so concentration and efficience are blasted. the reason for many cath using BS/CR in R7 was, again imo, the weak competion midround when those ships come up. FLTV player didn`t have to compete very intensivly that time, so they could concentrate on offence, for which a scorpien/tulla/manits fleet is pretty good (eventhough their cost-2-stop-ratios are worse than those from the lil shippies).

Originally posted by Moondoggie
Clearly you didn't pass your math class.

Spider cost = 1250, for one shot
or
1250 * 5 = 6250 for 5 shots

BW cost = 7500 for 5 shots

6250 < 7500, meaning spider is more efficient at freezing co than the black widow.

*shame on me*
i did pass it =) but thanks for ur correction... is it possible that spiders/bw had other stats r7 (maybe 6 guns for bw)???

makes spiders even better...

[TheSeeker]

Originally posted by BergSchrat
*shame on me*
i did pass it =) but thanks for ur correction... is it possible that spiders/bw had other stats r7 (maybe 6 guns for bw)???

makes spiders even better...

spiders used to cost 1500 C each...

[Sun Pin]

Originally posted by TheSeeker
spiders used to cost 1500 C each...

in what round?

[Spoticus]

Well me and argon wrote an extremely long cathaar guide last round for the cathaars in his random gal. I believe we also posted it on the forums at the time and it got pretty positive feedback.

Im pretty sure the basics of it are.

Early on:

Rush asap to FR class with ur other techs being ETA.

Get beetles and use excess c on Spiders until you have 250 spiders early on. (later increase this to 1k and later still 2k)

For the whole duration of your Black widow res/cons save ur resources as much as possible. When you can get them u should be able to get 400 black widows in one hit. This + beetles is basically unstoppable bar big def at this stage. The main problem is you are doing **** for your alliance def wise.

For this reason we usually focussed on hitting fi/co heavy targets, ie xan, while keeping roaches/excess beetle/spids out 24/7 on def.

At the start the small efficiency difference between spiders/bw's doesnt warrant the huge c soakage caused by spiders. Thats why i recommend only having those set #'s of spids. You can use them to get 15% cap off even the most annoying of co/fr terrans.
The only case i can remember where we could get close was a terran with an all co/fr fleet comprised mostly of 10kish chims and 4kish drakes. This fleet was totally unrealistic tho as i beleive he suicided his de/harpy the day before.

Dont bother with the big ships or the kill ships. As nice as they can be the goal is to keep your fleet mobile and efficient. Scorps are nice but your beetles have a use 24/7 scorps maybe only every few days.

Later in the round if you are lucky enough to get big, focus almost exclusively on spider/roach/beetle/defender. As the incoming you get will always be: Huge FI overkill, Huge DE overkill, or Huge Battleship Overkill, or surprise CO attacks.

As for stopping BS i recommend defenders over random fire taras as its low eta BS def, and ppl wont attack u with bs if they are gunna lose them. Plus once your big there is nothing more satisfying than doing more damage to a terran your same size than they do to you ^_^.

I admit this is just a random collection of things i remember, there was much much more, but i hope it helps anyway.

Edit: Forgot to add dont get scarabs, not matter how temped you are, they are horribly inefficent for a emp ship....

[Spoticus]

hmm a few other things to add now ive read some of the other replies.

Scorpions will rarely make it through all the fighters to fire on corvettes.

That might be true but the beauty of Scorps is around 1k of them forces them to send fi flak if they want to cap with co. And by sending fi flak they are now easier to defend against as you can get fi killing def or co killing def to do the job.

If you continue to tech fast to cr getting 50 mantis can be worth while for hitting n00b targets in C/P. Before long tho a cr attack fleet is pretty unfeasible as 100 dragons can stop you in your tracks and other races generally have good anti DE def which can also target your smaller CR fleet.

[-QS-]

Originally posted by Spoticus
As for stopping BS i recommend defenders over random fire taras as its low eta BS def, and ppl wont attack u with bs if they are gunna lose them. Plus once your big there is nothing more satisfying than doing more damage to a terran your same size than they do to you ^_^.

why should i bother bout BS? okay, a cath can`t attack a terran then with FR-pods later on, but defence-wise BS are no threat at all and the defender is nothing but crap...

[Spoticus]

late round bs incomming becomes pretty common. In r7 as cathaar ppl were able to kill 1k wyvern a tick with widowmakers. Defenders are a lot better than r7 widowmakers (eta, damage and initiative i think) so it makes roiding late round terrans possible as well as providing good def for ur alliance against inevitable mass BS inc on 1-2 planets each day.

[-QS-]

My point is that a BS is not pod. So if some1 gets peg/wyvern incs, he has to send his DE/FR away and I send in roach (as well as others send in fighter).
If a cathaar attacks with BS (which i think wont be popular), you still focus on CR, so he cant grab roids.
Same for zikos (if any1 builds BS with em)
There won`t be a xan building the dreadnought i guess.

The main point is to block/shoot the other units (especially pod class) massivly down, so that guy attacking won`t grab a roid and pulls, cause he`d loose too much.

defender are totally inefficient, eventhough they are the only way to attack a terran late round with small ships. i´d rather not attack terran than building crappy units