Elysium:R9.5 Cathaar Strategy

Originally posted by Friedrich

Seeing the efficiency ranking for anti de by bas inspired me to say something about an undervalued cathaar ship: the defender.

In my opinion defenders is a much ignored but very valuable ship. Yes they suck in killing pegs, they may come in handy when you want to cover bs incoming, though i don't think there'll be many BS attacking.

The main use i put my 1,7k defenders [ :) !] to is emp flak. It takes about 700 BW to stun 1k defenders (about 2.5 bw res to stunn 1 def res) deriving them from freezing my own bw and pods.

Whenever i attack cathaar or i expect in gal or cluster def with bw i set up a fleet that include defenders. Some people might argue well this is what the scarab is for. But If your target has spids (and most of the cathars have some spids) or you can expect that there will be spid defence, you scarabs won't shoot being stunned very efficiently by the high initiative spiders.

Also when you expect sentinel defence and you can not expect freezing them all (i mostly go for the 15% cap) they come in handy: the remaing sentinel unstunned by your beetles will target your defenders. And sentinel suck against them (res to kill ratio is like 7 iirc).

Well and whenever there's a peg - wyvern combo heading to some Ely planet, BCs will prolly be happy about some defenders: they are real good at killing BS and prolly most of the terrans won't accept high losses for their precious BS.

I agree they are pretty much useless against pegs themselves, but there for i have another 1,7k roaches. Roaches can't really be used for emp flak though if you go for the 15% cap. They are way stunned to easily.