Quote:
Originally Posted by Makhil
i almost forgot the last but crucial advantage : Zik fire first vs all races, your terran ship is firing last. I haven't been attacked by a terran DE fleet yet, but what you say confirms that the best ship is to be found in the 2 best races Zik and Terran.
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You clearly haven't spend more than 5 minutes looking at the stats. I've worked though about all logical attackfleets, versus all races. I don't want to give away all my conclusions, but you are clearly overrating the marauder. Yes, maybe it has decent armour. Yes, it might fire first. But those things dont matter if some ship which remeans untargetted kills your precious CR. You don't just look at armour/damage, you look for the uses of it.
Defence:
Marauder targets CO, has eta 10 (allaince/cluster defence 9, ingal eta 5). This clearly renders the marauder useless for defence out of gal. But what will it's use be for ingal defending?
There are 2 races with CO pods, terran and zik. The terran fi/co is utterly useless (you can figure out why yourself), it's DE attack fleet will be preferred by 95% of all terrans. Zik CO fleets aren't God's gift to planetarion either, it's practically only usefull early in game, before many CR/BS ships are build (Dragon, Tarantula, Fireblade and indeed the Marauder). So as soon as the Marauder and other CR/BS get around, the CO attack fleets are doomed anyways.
Attack:
Ofc the Marauder and Rogue (+ pod ofc) is the backbone of your attackfleet. They target fi (kill, init 5) + co (sub, init 1). As I said before, they can roid Cath + Zik easily, as long as you have more cruisers than your target has anti Cr.
Attacking terran will be a much tougher assignment. It's only anti CR ship is the Drake, which has decent firepower and very good armour. To get roids you'll have to disable his Drakes, meaning you'll have to disable roughly 40% of his entire fleetvalue with cutters. Let's assume you're a cutter heavy zik. Then you're sending CR + CO, targetting fi + co + de. Surely you'll convert his DE, but his centaurs and eventual dragons will destroy your cutter fleet. the only way to cap roids of a terran will be finding one with a weakness (few drakes), OR to send so much subverting ships you'll convert (almost) his entire fleet. Very easy to defend against.
Attacking Xandathrii isn't much easier with a CR fleet. It's only anti CR ships will be the bomber, unfortunately one of the shisp with fewest firepower/resource. Though it's a very usefull ship for xan players (attacking terran with fr/de, defending against CR fleets), so it will be around in large numbers. Again you have to disable a shipclass not targetted by your standard attackfleet. You could add corsairs or clippers to take care of the frigates. Corsairs are useless because they fire AFTER the bomber. Clippers fire first on the frigates, indeed converting the bombers as wanted. But pulsars will decimate your clippers, before your rogues fire on the pulsars. Only possible on much smaller xans.
So 65% of all planets within your 40% range will be very tough to roid, limiting your targets to mostly cathaar and other zikonian planets, both ALSO targetted by terran, cathaar and in somewhat lesser extend xan. So those targets who can be attacked by a CR attackfleet will be scarse and probably less roidfat.
And ofc CR attackfleets are quite slow, FR/DE defence has 2 ticks to be send (alliance/cluster), and even 3 for FI/CO (though they only effectively target support fleets, not the CR fleet itself).
In short: marauder is only usefull as flak for your CR pods, has very little defencive uses, and has quite low firepower.
In the beta with 15min ticks CR fleets are more powerfull, due less time to send defence, many unbalanced fleets (people are trying and buying with less thought than in the real round) etc etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Makhil
Xan Fi and FR are targeted by too many ships and Caths seem too busy defending vs everyone attacking them.
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Oh PLEASE ffs, xan is the only race who can effectively use two totally different attackfleets if you know what you are doing. Won't explain that one, you'll have to study the possibilities yourself.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Makhil
Maraudeur armour > xan BS and not far from other races BS, that's impressive.
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Yeah it's even more expensive than Xan BS
Duh, ofc it has moe armour, xan are the race with the firepower, not the armour. It's Dam/res is 45% higher than the marauder though. BTW it's totally irrelevant to this topic (comparing marauder with xan BS I mean).
Hmm bit longer post than expected.