About those Aeria Drone Hosts...

The only way to deal with strike craft, in the long run, is to have fighters of your own.  With the possible exception of hoshikos for TEC, carriers should be the first type of cruiser you unlock.  Be aware of your surroundings and ensure you don't fall behind tech-wise. 

Counter-wise, Vasari have the hardest time with carriers.  Aside from having your own fighters, your best course of action is to attack the carriers themselves, either depleting their anti-matter to prevent strike craft replacement or killing them outright.  Once the carriers are neutralized, flak can deal with the fighters effectively.  TEC and Advent have abilities on their light frigates to deplete anti-matter, while Vasari have a fairly lackluster self-healing ability.  However, skirmishers are still able to outrun and deal good damage to carriers, so if your enemy doesn't have enough LRF support you can actually run them down and kill them with those basic units.

gimme a guestimate of how many sentinels you had and how many carriers he had

Really doesn't matter; unless he had a ridiculous number of sentinels, fighters will kill a swarm of LRF faster than flak will kill fighters.  Flak alone won't work; you need to cut off the fighters at the source otherwise they'll be replaced as fast as you can kill them.

has anyone actually ever considered building adequate amounts of flak to counter carriers? and...OMG...sending in the flak first?

I have a question, but it has nothing to do with the Aeria Drone Host.

What does the Vasari Skirantra Carrier microphasing aura do after level 1?

Level 1: Range: 8000, Duration: 1

Level 2 & 3; just like level 1

Can anyone please tell me what's the difference?

That answer your question? (source: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/335807)

I've actually done that as TEC vs Advent Squadrons...tossed a nice 20 or so against 8 carriers.

It's quite ridiculous how many flak you need to do substantial damage versus a large squadron of strikecraft on the first flyby.   o_O  But balance I suppose. 

I suppose I'd have to build fighters, although you only get 4 fighters per squadron compared to 9 for advent...quite annoying.  :P 

So, in essence, fighters?  How about jam weapons thrown in?  Is that an effective ability versus strikecraft, for example, could it allow a fleet of strikecraft half as small to defeat such a strikecraft army?

Thanks for the input. 

Oh, and is that microphasing aura useful too?

Yes it does thanx Darvin,

wait a minute, thats all it does???

Chance: 20% / 30% / 30%

Pulse: 4 / 4 / 3

Please tell me its a joke?

Yeah, along with repair cloud (which is the only ability in the game that repairs strike craft, I should add), it's a decent capital ship to have around.  Still, it's a very passive capital ship, not a miracle worker.  Must-have against a Kol, however, since you can use its repair cloud to effectively negatve flak barrage (although that won't work against two or more kols)

Vasari strike craft deal more damage and have more hit points.  Normally this still is advantage Advent (at least IMO) but if you're up against a Kol the Advent suddenly isn't going to be very happy when one round of flak barrage kills all his fighters instantly, while your's can run back to a carrier cap for healing.

Jam weapons is more a matter of when than if.  Every faction needs their own anti-strike craft abilities eventually, but you don't need to bring them out as your second capital ship.  Jam weapons will give you breathing space so your army doesn't get minced before you can clear out some of those fighters and carriers.

I have been working on this question for quite a long time now.  You can see numerous posts by me (and others) on it, and even a few tests I've run where I've tried various counters (flak, lf, etc) and posted results.  One of my posts you might want to track down is "an attempt at countering carriers without using carriers" or someting like that.

The bottom line is, to this day I have never been able to counter anybody's carriers, ever, without building carriers of my own.  Now, maybe it's possible (in other words, maybe I just suck), but I haven't been able to do it thus far.  Also, if it's true that only carriers can truly counter carriers, I'm not saying that's a bad game design.  Maybe it's good, or maybe it sucks - I'm offering no comment there.  I'm simply saying I've never had success countering carriers without building carriers.  This still doesn't stop me from trying, though.  Most games, I build zero carriers.  This means I either kill the other guy before he makes carriers, or I lose.  But at least I can say I did it... *my* way.

Yes, see one of my posts on this where I tested and posted results.

One problem I have in a game against a "real person" is that it is simply damn hard to make flak in numbers adequate enough to counter carriers.  In a game tonight, for instance, I literally scouted the guy's system and hand-counted how many carriers he had.  I wanted 2 flak per carrier.  I had multiple frig factories pumping continuously.  Did I ever get to the number?  No.  He could build carriers faster than I could build twice as much flak.  I strongly suspect that the amount of time it takes to build a flak needs to be reduced, but I haven't looked at the number.

Yes.  Makes for nice stats at the end - your strikecraft kills are through the roof.  Doesn't do much else though, as far as I can tell.

See my post here on using telekentic push for the advent halcyon carrier: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/340003/page/3

Please note that telekenetic push is considered one of the "better" anti-strikecraft abilities, while the kortul jam weapons is considered the worst.

However, feel free to take all of what I say here with a grain of salt, if not a truckload.  The "pros" claim that countering carriers is no big deal, its a piece of cake.  You're just some stupid newb if you can't do it, you see.  "Howdididothat" is a main proponent of this view - check out some of his posts and see what he has to say.  He is also a proponent of using capital ships to counter strikecraft.

i recommend one of two paths to use as a Vasari to counter early carriers.

1) Lights and Flaks

the first approach is a straight defensive counter. you can counter a carrier with about 2 Ravastra Skirmishers and 1 Junsurak Sentinel per carrier. you need the Skirmishers to actually kill the carriers and it will take a fair bit of time to kill them even so, because carriers are fairly durable and Skirmishers have kinda bad damage (even though they deal extra damage to carriers). the Sentinels are NOT a comprehensive counter to squadrons. they just buy time by whittling down the numbers of strikecraft in each squadron. its not feasible to destroy all of his squadrons using just Sentinels but they are still important to reduce the damage you'll recieve from squadrons while your skirmishers hunt down the carriers. 

this approach does work but it has many flaws. first of all it is not cost effective in the long run. you've used 19 fleet logistics and about 1300 creds, 180 metal, and 40 crystal to counter each carrier. thats more or less exactly the same cost as a Drone Host (and a greater cost than a Percheron or Lasurak carrier). second, it has not viability outside of straight defense. you can repel carriers with it but those ships are not very useful for pushing the offense once you've defeated the attack. finally, it is easy to "counter-counter". the carrier player can defeat your Skirmishers by including even a relatively small number of Long Range Frigates mixed in with his carriers. 

2) Force Multiplier

the other approach to countering carriers is to just use your own carriers (fighter squadrons, specifically) but to include force multiplying support ships so that you can defeat a large number of his carriers with a much smaller number of your own. this is the approach i prefer because it is both cost effective and has offensive as well as defensive applications. 

the best force multipliers for the Vasari come in the form of capital ship special abilities.

A Skiranta Carrier can turn the tide of a fighter dogfight by a huge amount with repair cloud and micro-phasing. between the two of those abilities you are unlikely to take ANY fighter losses within the radius around the Skiranta. as long as your Carrier lives you'll have air superiority in its zone of control. repair cloud is the better of the two abilities so put your points in that first, but micro-phasing is incredibly useful in fighter vs. fighter battles, don't underestimate it. 

the other force multiplier you can use is the Jam Weapons ability on a Kortul Destructor. its a good ability for gaining the upper hand in fighter vs. fighter fights. as long as the Kortul has anti-matter the enemy squadrons will have a very limited ability to actually shoot back and they'll get picked apart pretty quickly by your own squadrons. the issue with this of course is that the Kortul doesn't have alot of anti-matter of its own and you won't be able to use the also incredibly useful Power Surge ability at the same time, as they compete too much for the limited AM supply. 

obviously you'll also need Lasurak Transporters to complete the force multiplier strategy. however, if you have a level 2 or 3 cap ship supporting your fleet then you can probably take out enemy squadrons with 2-to-1 leverage or more. in this scenario the first thing that will happen is your fighters will completely destroy all of his squadrons. then they'll start going after the now helpless carrier cruisers and will usually be able to inflict critical damage on them before they've rebuilt enough of their strike craft to start fighting back. 

the good news is that when its finished you'll now have your own strike force of 2 cap ships (probably Jarrasul and Skiranta/Kortul) and a handful (4ish maybe) of Lasuraks to go attack the enemy with. the bad news is that you'll have to play very conservatively in the early game and won't be able to invest heavily in a fleet of Assailants because you have to judiciously apply your resources towards acquiring a 2nd cap ship and 3 or 4 carriers (quite expensive). trust me though, you will have enough resources (just barely) to get this stuff built in time.  

Transitive says it quite well. However investing in light frigates should be a high prioraty. It has the highest damage, 2nd Cobalts and 3rd Dissiples. But if you leave them "stock" they'll fall short but if you upgrade theur weapons and their hull they'll turn into nasty little buggers. And lvl1 upgrades are cheap. And reintergration it alot more usefull then what it's said to be. The longer the enemy is shooting at one ship the more dps he is wasting and the more dps you can put on target. After you ahve a few skirmishers get the carriers out. That way your already to counter a carrier rusher of a LRF spammer. All thats leaft to brign your force to operation is to get assailants since they are now protected.

But I'm not a Vasary player and more fo them like to take assailants out rigth off the bat. But if they do that they should also upgrade the weapons right away. Just pray you get sufficiant carrier support before the enemy come and rip the assailants appart. That'S the weak point in the vasary strat since you know you have Evacuator, assailants and then carriers.

standard Vasari rush opening is to build a Jarrasul and then scrap the cap yard. then build as many Assailants as possible and either go after the nearest Terran world (if you want an expansion base) or go right after one of your enemy's resource asteroids. 

this standard rush tactic hasn't worked very well for a long time though because a single carrier counters about 5-6 Assailants. most players will skip over the LRF rush and go directly for carriers. its usually not a good idea to scrap the cap yard immediately since you probably want a 2nd cap ship in the mid-game (alot of players will wait until their Jarrasul is level 6 and has planet suction before building a 2nd cap, but i don't bother to wait and go for cap #2 as soon as i can afford it). the logic is simple. if your opponent committed to LRF's then he gets countered and you win. if he didn't go for LRFs he's also teching up to carriers and your best counter to carriers is your own carriers (plus some vitally important support abilities provided by cap ships). its actually more typical to build 6-8 Assailants to escort the carriers (protects them against Lights) then it is to build 20+ assailants as a main attack force. 

Wow, thanks for all the responses guys! 

And I have read quite a good deal of comments from you, Agent of Kharma, on the ongoing debate on carrier/flak balance, which has helped me with some general countering of the carrier issue with all races.  I read on another post that they're considering lowering the speed of carriers, and hopefully they input that reduced build time for SC in regular Sins. 

Thanks Transitive for that great detail in employing the Vasari capitals in gaining the upper hand in a SC battle!  I'll have to try that Skiranta next time I face some carrier spam.

Will reintegration allow said skirmisher to survive a focus fire from lrf?  I know skirmishers can take quite a beating from strikecraft, seeing as they were the only part of my fleet living when the advent carrier spammed me. 

Another question:  How do the Vasari support cruisers match up to this type of carrier swarming?  Are they ineffective or do they have any worthwhile abilities to utilize in such a battle?

Again, thanks everyone for the tips!

The Severun Overseer's Reactive Nanite Armor provides the affected ship with 200 hull points instantly and a bonus of 2 armor points. This ability is stackable to a maximum of normal max hull + 200, so ten Overseers can replenish 2000 hull points in a very short time. The armor bonus lasts for 60 seconds or until the added hull points are depleted. All the Overseer can do is prolong the lifetimes of your ships with RNA and its other two abilities are unrelated to carrier combat.

As for the Stilakus Subverter, with Distortion Field, it can lock down ships for 20 seconds at a time, but not strike craft. Aside from stopping carriers from rebuilding strike craft for 20 seconds, they can't do much against the strike craft themselves.

What you can invest in is the Charged Missiles ability that the Sentinel and the Kanrak share. This upgrade gives their phase missiles an area-of-effect attack in the form of pulse beams hitting nearby targets. The upgrade produces obvious results for the Kanrak (its the green beams extending from ship to ship when Kanrak missiles hit), but the same thing happens between strike craft and the Sentinel's missiles, which helps it clear out multiple strike craft.

I haven't played online much, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I find that if you can get subverters into a good position, you can "lock down" the enemy carriers to prevent them from building any more ships (and shut down their protection in the form of most of the enemy fleet). Shortly afterward, use jam weapons to take out the offensive capabilities of as many strikecraft as possible, and use flak to thin the numbers. Use your forces to kill as many of the disabled carriers as possible, and hopefully you should come out on top.

Lots of luck.

what we all have to remember here is that in entrenchment (which is finally ready... yay!) carriers have a build rate penalty when enemy ships are in the gravity well. that greatly increases the usefulness of flak

No - they have a self repair ability that the LF shares with the HCs. The LF also have a tech you can research that doubles the AM cost to build.

I played against a TEC player the other day who spammed carriers originally. He also get a jump on me as I spent a bit longer getting my eco up and running (which long term helped). My issue was I had some assailants, but knew he was coming with fighters. So I got some flak and LF as well as some carriers of my own. I was winning the battle well until he realised the carrier spam was losign and that he needed LRMs in his fleet as well. The LRMs were dangers to my cap and my LF, so I needed Assailants as well. Long story short. I won by jumping my fleet back to my world to repair when my ships (esp cap) got lots of damage.

The trick is to send the LF chasing the carriers, your fighters and LRMs after his LRMs and have flak around you cap while the cap does what it does (killing factory/bombing planet etc...). Flak chasing their fighters is no good. Flak while they fight overhead is... Esp if you can get a kortual and/or Skiranta into the fight)

One important thing to remember when attacking carriers with LF. Unless you are trying to kill an already damaged carrier, target the ones with full AM as they are the dangerous ones (they can rebuild their fighters). The ones without AM are less of a threat as they need to recharge before they can target you.

The subverter is actually an *excellent* support cruiser - my favorite in the whole game.  It does an "in grav well phase jump" which teleports it to the target, then locking it down (disabling it).  Has another ability too which drops the shield mitigation.  I highly recommend them for use against most ship types.  Unfortunately, they don't counter carriers very well, if at all (sigh).  Furthermore, they drop like flies to fighters.  Basically, you cannot field them in any grav well which has enemy fighters in any numbers, and be confident that they will survive.

Correction on overseer. It's 250 hull hp points retored instantly. Rest was accurate. And for their incombat repair of other ships Overseers. Most of the time vasary players over shoot the support cruiser and got to HCs instead. Whitch always mind bottles me as with HC to improve your combat force you need a few of them and their more expensive to researcha nd build then the support cruiser who they will helpp keep your loses down and thus preserve your economie. In most battles the victor is decided by who can withstand the most punishment from the enemy the longest.

Proof of that is one of my first last night againts one other TEC player:

I had:
1 Marza
20 Cobalts
10 Carriers
10 Flak
10 Kodiacs
30 Hoshikos

He Had:
1 Akkan
10 Cobalts
20 LRMs
10 Carriers
20 Kodiacs
10 Flak

DPS wise he had me totaly out gunned sicne I didn't have barage yet and when i got it couldn't use it since his Akkan would have countered it anyways. Long story short i came up on top because of 2 things. The first being because i could out-tank him hands down. The second i also had demolition bots that did a great deal in cuttign down his killign power. I wiped a bit mroe then half of his fleet while i lost only 10 or so ships. Also my first targets when he attaked me was his 10 hoshikos. Support crusers for all races are realy powerfull and deadly, not as them selves but as the force multiplier effect they have on a fleet. IF you don't build a sufficiant number of support ships your just askign to get step on.

This just isn't true about not being able to outbuild carriers....I started building those carriers a while earlier, and I was building them from two locations.  You could have kept making more sentinels... you were on defense, and it was much easier for you to reinforce.  At some point, you switched back to assailants.  I do not argue the power of carriers, but everyone shouldn't be so sensationalistic about this subject....

There was a point when your sentinels and hangars pretty much totally neutralized my carrier fleet.   Look at the game about 50 minutes in...all 9 of my carriers can barely get enough fighters together to spit.  ...at 52 minutes in, they had virtually nothing.   The problem was, you had nothing that was very effective against my cap ship at the time, so I was still able to make headway, and you were not trying to kill the carriers themselves, you were focusing on my cap.  At 54 minutes I pulled out to rebuild strikecraft because the carriers still had nothing, my cap culdn't tank anymore, and you had assailants in.   Of course, I had colonized your asteroid at this point, but point being, the carriers were totally neutralized, largely by your flak...your fighters had been mostly shooting at my cap.

BTW, your first judgement call to double rush red was a good idea, if you had both hit him, he would have been utterly destroyed, and even though i would have been big, it would have been 2v1.  There was no way I would have been able to rescue him, he was so far from me.

Later when you were doing yoru diversionary raiding, when you had 9 sentinels and I had only 2 carriers at my HW, those 2 carriers were utterly helpless, because they couldn't get anything in the air before it was shot down.

There is some fine line where carriers will not be the ship of choice..... I have definately noticed the impact of the slower carrier build rate in Entrenchment.  When we cross that fine line, carriers will become near worthless again.  We aren't there yet, however, but the last balance tweak has done some good at bringing things more in line.  I agree that carriers were a little on the OP side in 1.14, always did.  Hopefully they won't go back to where they were near useless like in 1.05.

Here is a Replay Link for anyone who wants to see how it went down...

http://www.sendspace.com/file/oitn2q

(also, if anyone does happen to care enough to watch the replay, check out my "Egg Escape!" at a few minutes past 1 hour where my Evacuator comes pretty close to getting killed)

I'm an advent player but I don't spam drone hosts.  Though they are my counter for fighter/bomber carrieres anyway.  I can't seem to counter carriers with anything but carriers. 

Carriers are the workhorse of your fleet, no getting around it.  You don't need to spam them, but you need to have some of them.  Flak can clean up strike craft once carriers have been neutralized, but you can't gain a functional strike craft supremacy without strike craft of your own.

Had a nice battle with another advent hard comp yesterday, again the disciple/anima drone army. 

Jam Weapons did wonders, kept my fighters alive, while the Skiranta Carrier made sure everything stay healthy.  Skirmishers did a nice job of hammering away at those carriers. 

And I learned that Gravity Warhead plus Phase Jump Inhibitors is a really evil combination.