PlanetsCentral

Is it necessary?

No it's not. To what are you comparing PList3.2 to make the statement that it is unbalanced? Have a look at the planets.nu statistics. 90 percent of the games are won by either priv or borg or empire. Compared to that we are quite balanced here.

The imbalances we are encountering here are mainly an outcome of different playerskills and not to mention drop outs. There are cloaking races and non-cloaking races and the latter devide into the balanced and the heavy races - and only together do they form a complicated balance of power.

NS1 is a good example. What happened there was that most of the heavy races vanished around turn 25, the last one at turn 40 (borg). Since they vanished the cloaking races lost their prey and the balanced races lost their natural enemies. So noone could hope to stop a good player playing one of the balanced races - namely FED or Lizzys. And thus the outcome was inevitably:

1. Lizzy
2. Klingon
3. priv/crystal

As far as I can say only the bird is a weak race. Dunno why. Maybe I just did not encounter any good bird players yet. Though I did once. However that's nothing new for PList only. Have a look at planets.nu. That's T-List. Birds are negligible there too.

Thus a cloaking scout for every race is pretty much out of questions. Last reason to play bird... but if you want to make changes in the config, focus on those to benefit the birds.