Scout Rush -- could someone please explain this?

The scout rush you're referring to is probably Raging Amish's scout rush. It is actually a pretty decent strategy. It involves sending about 7 - 8 scouts to your enemies homeworld. Have the scouts destroy the constructors. While doing this, tech up to 3 military stations and unlock timed explosives for scouts. Meanwhile, you colonize and shit.

Start blowing shit up in your enemies homeworld once you unlock timed explosives. You need to be TEC to do this strategy because they're the only race with this ability. It works very well on small maps. But it can be countered. Fighters can cut through scouts in seconds and a Sova cap ship can embargo your enemy as a counter.

At least, that's how I did it. But I also got lucky, there weren't enough scouts left to finish my frigate factory.

it's funny how people develop strategies in this game, i mean wow who could say that scouts can be so deadly weapon...does it work with A.I?

There is no such thing as scout rush, move along, nothing to see here.

You ask about Vasari and Advent. Vasari shouldn't mass scouts. You can get assailants so quick that a lot of Vasari scouts is stupid, but they are still critical because they are what capture neutral mines.

Advent scouts have some practicality, as they have some armor. Here's what I do. For your first fleet, get about 8 scouts. That's all you need for your starting fleet. They have anti light damage, so they can focus on the seige frigate (light armor), while your cap captures and fights off the light frigate. There's ways to get creative after this of course...

Other than that, there's not too much of a case for scouts. They don't do enough damage to be effective. Unless your opponent is spamming seige frigates, don't bother with these as a major military force.

Heh heh. I think I've figured out what Innociv and the Clan Xers were referring to in IRC...but we can let it remain our little secret.

this tactic seems to be a copy of the zerg rush tactic.
just send a bunch of scouts the you opponents home world at the start and keep sending them.They won't have many ships so 8-10 scouts can do quite a bit especially if you send a constant stream.Think 2 light frigates vs. 10 scouts with a stream of scouts come during the battle.

A pure scout rush doesn't work, at all. 8 scouts will lose to 3 or 4 light frigs. Scout rushes in this game are a stalling tactic. Now, if the opponent is stupid enough to make the long range frig, then yeah, scouts will tear them apart, but the light frig counters the scout so well and it's so cheap, there's no sense in a pure scout rush.

What DOES work is targeting the shit that only the scout is effective against and then running, because nothing will catch a scout except for fighters and bombers. Constructors are the ideal target, those and colony frigs. You can impede your opponent's progress so much that he can't do what he wants to effectively.

Throw in the bomb ability with the TEC with an LRM spam, and the scout rush tactic suddenly is a viable option.

How do you capture neutral mines? I've searched the documentation but haven't figured out how to do this.

Fludlerk for TEC use colony frigs - the others I don't know

Fludlerk I believe the Vasari scout ships have a second ability that let them capture "neutral minerals". This only works in uncolonizable areas such as asteroid fields.

TEC and Advent use Colony frigs, but they're vulnerable and the recharge rate is so slow they're only worth a planet or two in the beginning. Usually I have a small fleet with an extra colonizer cap floating around behind my main fleet that I use for defense/attacks behind enemy lines and any neutral planets I come along.

Since they're scouts they have better weapons, they're cheaper, faster etc. It gives the race a huge advantage at taking over these roids.

It might be advent but I'm pretty sure it's Vasari. They definately have the civil tech tree to match it.

You have to turn off auto-explore on your Vasari scouts to use it though - they lose so much antimatter from jumping around that they have to stick around long enough to recharge before they can capture the mine. When I find a non-colonizable gravwell with resources in it, I flip autoexplore off and automining on for that scout (or colony frigate), as then it'll grab all the resource asteroids in that gravwell.

-- Retro