[furball]

Originally Posted by Proxi

Utterly right, thought i think it was furball who said earlier that either cat are shite or they end up overpowered.

Actually, I took Jester (Banned)'s point about this and spammed it in every thread that moaned about Cath in one way or another.

There was a long debate about Cath while stats were being worked on in the beta. I'll reproduce it for some of you here now. It's long but it will explain a lot of the thinking behind the stats. For the competent forum users, it all starts from here.

Originally Posted by Gate

I was worried that I had overpowered cath, and I've had complaints about CR being too powerful as well

Originally Posted by Banned

I think you should take a good, hard look at CR this round to see why CR isn't too powerful next round. On a simple ship to ship basis, the damage/armor ratios might be good, but CR is largely competing with attack fleets, which means you're likely to face planets having 50-80% of their value in these fleets, as opposed to the average 15-30% for defense fleets. This means that when people call for anti-CR, they'll want and appreciate large amounts of Ghosts (which people will have because they can use phantoms/seraphs to fake their FR) and Barghests. Barghs fire at great efficiency against Tulas and Hornets, meaning that despite surviving Roach, they'll force recalls more often than not. Equal value Barghs and 'balanced' CR fleets will result in heavy casualties for the CR, while low casualties (after salvage) for the Barghs.

Originally Posted by Gate

Meanwhile, in terms of defence, caths are immune to cath FR (recluse stun vipers, preventing them from shooting, scorpions are 0-loss FR killships), xand FR (scorps alone) and cath CR (mantis). They can also be very tough to roid with zik CR and terran DE, leaving one fleet from each of the other races that only goes up against EMP; compared with this round when it was easy to roid caths with ter DE, ter BS, cath FR, xan FI, xan FR or zik CO...

Originally Posted by furball

Repeat after me:
Cath are not immune to any attacks.
Cath are not immune to any attacks.
Cath are not immune to any attacks

How can you consider anyone immune to an attack when all the attack has to do is flak past them for 0-loss???

Originally Posted by Banned

Listen to the man, Gate. I've been labeled 'cath killer' for not paying attention to this.

Originally Posted by furball

And then you just get multiple attackers on that target and you're back to square one.

Originally Posted by furball

It'll always be easy to roid Cath because they put their resources into their attack fleets, then attack with them. A Cath cannot survive without roiding every single day, because they are screwed on defence. You know yourself how easy it is to attack Caths if you've got enough of the right ship. That's why Cath must be strong on attack. Cath was screwed in Round 13 because one of their fleets was bad on attack - and I don't want to see a repeat for Round 17.

Originally Posted by furball

even if it's inefficient to roid a Cath with a certain class (due to mass EMP), one or two more attackers will make it viable again. The lack of killing prevents immunity.

On the lower tiers, no-one is immune.

Originally Posted by Banned

Which is why I hate Cath, it's so blatantly the 'top10 planets and scanners only' race.

Almost to the point where I think all races should have the same base 6 ships, with 3 'flavor' ships and pods/SKs the only real difference.

There's a lot more to that debate than I've pasted in here, and it gets rather philosophical near the end. Further, the stats were a work in progress and they changed as the debate went on. I didn't look at the final stats, let alone calc them. All those who want to be 'the stats maker', get involved in these threads or keep out of the way. I heard some time ago that Troll's a bit of a stats-maker, but no-one will ever know without some useful contributions from him on the Strategy forum.

So - let's all just wait for the races and fleet sizes to balance out at around tick 800. Until then, kthxbye.