I'm also having issues with this. Seems like spamming anything but LRMs and some cobalts is getting pointless. They have light armor and do anti-medium frigate damage at long range... what do you have early game against that? only the scouts and fighters can deal anti-light damage, but I don't see myself getting new planets with a scout fleet.

for tec and advent, flaks come before Long range ships.

It is theoretically possible that subverters could gate in close and shut down some of those puppies, but the problem is, your subverters would cost you a hell of a lot more than illums would cost him, plus they are further down the tech tree for you, so this wouldn't work.

This is what you should do: take a friend, have him play as advent and send 1 illum to your planet, you try one of each frigate type against it, see which one is cost effective to field against it. Then you have your answer. I mean, there has to be something reasonable to throw at it - it may boil down to a boring old skirmisher.

bingo.

One thing not shown is the relative military techs.

Illums are T3, at this he can have one beam damage, two shield techs, two health techs. If he has a several/all of those (or even further in mil with more upgrades), and you have none or few, that's a big edge. Neither of you are using support ships in the fight, mass illums will probably beat mass Assailant straight up (due to triple hits). Light Frigates after early game become oriented to anti-support ship.

They probably had the advantage straight up anyways, but techs could've made an even much larger difference. Malice if he got it off before you killed his Progenitor could've made a very large difference as well.

just try a mixed force with flaks, you will be surprised.

One thing I did notice was that my Assailants (that's the Kodiak equiv. right?) did last a lot longer than the Skirmishers, so I may try a lot of those next time with carriers.

Assailants are LRM equivalents. They probably lasted longer because Illus didn't target them; ships generally try to target enemies that take the most damage from their weapons. Anticapital weapons do only 75% damage against light armour.

Anyways, against just Illuminators you would have done fine. It was the Progenitor / Guardian shield bubble that you had problems dealing with. I suggested a couple of Subverters earlier because they would have made the two Progenitors easier to kill with shield disruption thingamajig (not for shutting down Illus like someone said earlier.)

Interference for Skirmishers might have helped with Guardians, but you didn't have that researched.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?forumid=452&aid=177602

from that thread above, it looks like if the advent LRM would have not just anti-cap weapons, which i wouldnt really understand why they would give to a frigate, but also capital armor class which basically means that all the other frigates deal reduced damage to it.

Severly reduced in cases. Like:
Light frigs with anti-heavy damage type would only do 50% against a capital armor.
LRMs with their anti-medium would be a bit better off doing 75%
Scouts is just a stupid idea, as while they still take 75% damage from capital weapons, their anti-light only does 25% to capital armor.

So all in one, if the info in that table is true, then the advent LRM is the most imbalanced thing i've seen in this game yet. It deals full damage to basically everything - incl. capitals - but only takes 50-75% damage from the same targets, except capitals, which would deal 100%. Then again, if you look at the dps output of one illum and the dps of a typical cap, you will realize that 50 illums especially with their 100% damage vs cap will shread any capital to pieces before that cap would have a chance to kill just one of the illuminators.

Quite some value for the price of a an LRM.

I think there might have been a typo in either that table (which i woubt considering the * and the special treatment the ship got there), or in the data files assigning armor / weapon types to ships.

The Illuminator has Light Armor, not Capital. That chart is off (though only on that). It does have anti-capital damage (which reduces it's damage against other LRMs, and lacks the heavy damage bonus of other LRMs against medium targets).

Either way, it's either Bomber's or Fighter's to go vs. advent LRM ... 75%(Bombers) or 25% (Fighters) Damage recieved with only a 10% chance to get hit by capital damage.

Also, add to that that you can simply kite the LRM's with some carriers (as posted above).

Personally, I'd rather take a Sun Tzu approach... If the enemy has bigger guns, don't fight... *g*

well.. i don't really know which chart to believe in.. the 3 i just checked displayed 3 different lines for the illuminators. doh.

Still i do feel that there is something odd about them. Maybe it is just the fact that their capitals have supporting abilities you can barely break without using anitmatter draining or special ability disabling ships yourself.. but fact stays:

a single mothership with 30-40 illuminators is a force you dont want to confront head-on. Not with a similar sized fleet that is.

i think there would really be no problem with the illuminators, if they would have the same anti-med damage as all the other LRMs. Given their armor is really just light.

I simply dont see a reason why the illuminators have the capital damage. Sure they are high on the tech tree.. lvl3 i think, but their price does not reflect that at all.. so once you do the initial investment to research them, you can just pump them out like any other LRM out there.


Yeah, if you have time to maneuver and if the enemy has not anti-fighter ships mixed with his fleet. A handful of those tears your dozens of bomber/fighter squads to shreds. Then there you are without a 'counter' again.

And as for not fighting.. if they are knocking on your colonies door, then you hardly have a choice.. its not like there is much headspace in a medium galaxy to get more than 2 jumps of warning before a fleet like this strikes at you. So you hardly got enough space to maneuver and kite them, not to mention the fact, that you can't afford the luxury to lose colonies permanently if its 1/10, or 1/12 of the total colonizable planets in the galaxy.

I'm not saying they are unbeatable, im merely saying, that comparing a fleet of 40 human LRMs with 1-2 caps to a similar fleet of the advent, the advent are a much more fearsome opponent to fight against.

Maybe it is merely me picking on the advent as they were the ones causing me the most trouble until now.. maybe it is just that i havent seen really goot tec players yet, while i have met some decent advent ones.. still.. those are my impressions.

Bottomline:
You can't just ignore the circumstances when you suggest a counter or tactic.

many of the charts have typos, use http://roe.totalgamingnetwork.com/wiki/index.php/Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire/Flak
which has extracted the info into nice format from the files.

By having capital damage, they lack the +50% damage to medium armor anyways (and have a 75% damage to light, instead of 100%). They're just better against heavy targets than other LRMs. Changing them to Anti-Medium without adjusting their damage output would probably be more of a buff than a nerf.

As for the chance to hit comment, nothing beyond Flak, Fighter/Bombers, and specific capital abilities can actually target strikecraft.

Then why are there hit chances for them listed in Gameplay.constants?

Probably old beta stuff they tried and didn't bother to remove when they changed it.

*g*

So you are essentially saying, that if someone is presenting a problem by taking a one sided approach to it, then you are also allowed to make half-a$$ed attempts at providing a solution?

You think that "OMFG! Look at all those Illums *despairs* I can't beat them *cries* My Ships! My Ships! wheredidtheygo??? *surrenders*" is lame?

Well then. I think that: "OMFG! Noob, there is nothing wrong with them illums!" is just as lame, if not even lamer.

While i do not agree with people who just cry about stuff not going their way and always reserve the possibility that i might be wrong, i also expect people to not just give blanket answers for specific scenarios as it is not only counter productive, but outright bordering trolling in which they are knowingly trying to degrade a topic by making fun of the issues presented in it.

Can we stick to the topic then without the useless posing and general smarta$$ remarks please?

Well, it should've been clear that my posting was meant to be humorous or if not, at least sarcastic. I guess some people take some things way too serious. Like losing in a game.

Since the problem was stated as "Lots of AdventLRM are too powerful" the solution obviously is "frag those LRM's" by "build stuff that's good vs LRM's". Or rather: If the enemy goes Rock on your Scissors, go Paper him.

Sarcasm <> Humor m8.


I would like to stress: "jest or mock a person situation or thing" + "intended to insult or wound"

As I stated above, I've got five or six different suggestions in this very thread on how to counter a tactic that throws all fleet diversity out the window. I used roughly half in this game. The ones I haven't tried yet are using Subverters and scouts. The former seems relatively reasonable, the latter seems absolutely insane and I have no idea why it would be set up this way.

If people are going to claim that there's an easy way to beat spammers, I'd like to see them make up their minds on what works, because they sure haven't figured out a unified way to do it yet. Or maybe..they've never played a game against a Illum spammer?



Go away, troll. If the only contribution you can make to a thread is rehashing old complaints that were addressed in the OP under the guise of "sarcasm" (I did use carriers) stop posting. At least some others actually had the time to watch the replay and make constructive comments on it: despite me largely disagreeing with their conclusions.

The thing is, it's just like the Cobalt spamming in the beta. With a lack of crystal, a lot of players simply made their end-game fleets 50 Cobalts and a few caps - unless they had some ice planets, then it'd be 50 Kodiaks and a few caps. I'm concerned that fleet diversity is necessarily being hindered on the Advent side, and this is coming from a guy who plays Advent 99% of the time and only chose Vasari here for shits and giggles. I don't want to see someone rampage through the galaxy with 70 of ANY ship type, unless it is supported by 70 of another. Difficulty should be equal on both sides, and I shouldn't be bothered to Benny Hill my carriers around the gravity well to keep them alive, or hover over the Repair Cloud while I'm attempting to colonize another system or do something..well..4X. The other player could simply turn on Autocast for the shield regeneration and go. That's unacceptable.

How could you possibly know how I intended my statement?

Did I try to make fun of some situation or another? Yes.
Did I do it to insult, mock or whatever anyone? No.

If you can't take a joke please, don't communicate. Fun eventually happens.



So, you didn't like my opinions about carriers or not fighting at all. Well, what about the following:
a. Don't present a Target. Mainly, build stuff that capital damage isn't good against and thats good vs LRM's (mainly other LRM's and Scouts (Surprise!)).
b. Don't let the enemy build up such a fleet. I know, I know ... we all want big fleets and bigger battles, but honestly both the RTS genre as well as the 4X genre basically teach that battles are won before the first shot is fired. Put in a different way: if you let the enemy advance to a point where he can field big numbers of units you did something wrong. This is mainly true on smaller maps. See c. for Large Maps.
c. Yeah, "not fighting" again. If the Map is big enough for a long build-up phase, simply go away. Split your fleet, harass his planets ... something like that. Works for me ...

Okay, next time I will build more than 25 Assailants and spam a non-combat ship rather than employing such antiquated notions and strategies as "fleet diversity" and "large guns".



I usually just don't build fleets at all. I just let my opponents invade all my planets and blow up my stuff. Works for me.

...seriously, watch the replay. You're acting as if we were in the same system or something. I was busy invading another player as he attacked from a completely other system, the only possible way I could attack him is with my Kestrel Cannon which would take 20 minutes to move cross-system and do very little.

It sounds to me that you sadly had jumped in at the wrong time. THe moment you saw that fleet you should have retreated and got your bearings.

Now depending on the situation you should have time to pump a few extra ships and a single reserach, sounds like you had most of them though...

store up your Anti Matter and I would produce more Enforcers (kodiak equivelent)

Then jump in and take out that mothership and the iconus guardians first. After that, you should be able to take down the Illums, though it will still be at a heavy loss.

I think you had a decent fleet, you just stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time, and didn't rectify it by getting the hell out of dodge.

But don't sweat it, knowing when to retreat is one of the hardest skills to learn in this game.

Let's just get one thing straight:

Never use a fleet of scouts as a counter to anything

Against illums u need a mixture of flak/sentinels and fighters (not bombers). Keep your caps away until the number of illums has died down. You also need to match fleet size or you'll lose regardless. Set the flak/sentinels to guard the carriers, then keep the carriers moving (and well away from any supporting caps). This way the illums will keep moving out of range of beneficial effects from their supporting cap ships, and your flak is kept away from the harmful aoe abilities. Meanwhile u need to remind ur fighters what their job is.

The good thing about the carriers is that once the illums are in short supply u can scrap the fighters and use bombers instead.

In current games u will never regret researching flak