TEC HC spam. Too easy in diplomacy

Most likely a combo of Vasari LRFs and carriers with bombers. LRFs target the Kols and the carriers (with their bombers safely in their bays) hold to attack until after the Kols are mostly done for. Also the Vasari can get their own help in supply points (phasic communications I believe under civilian or whatever the Vasari use) to help equalize this.

Hm.

(Please note I only play TEC, therefore all the advice I give you will be in TEC format. If you don't want to play TEC, don't read my post. Oh, and Vasari Starbases suck, fyi. )

Sounds to me like your issue is dependence on Percheron's and their firepower. Given the overwhelming strength and untouchability of SC in large numbers, I can see why this appeals to you.

To be quite honest I applaud your friend for countering the oh so typical SC spam. But as to countering him? Hmm...

In terms of DEFENSE: Since you know he's aiming for your Starbases, ever considered the Kamikazee option? Rather than invest heavily in Firepower and Armor, infest moderatly into the two Self Destruct options. He'll see the weak Starbase, rush for it (simply because he probably has never had this done to him before) and when it dies...

BOOSH

Most of his fleet will be taken out in the blast. If martyrdom doesn't suit you, try investing in the Supply Docks ability for StarBases, then build 3-4 Repair Defenses around it, with Guass Spam for good measure. The Repair Docks will keep everything alive, the Guass will weaken his Kodiaks, and the Starbase keeps everyone alive and full of Antimatter.

For offense (as in fleet-wise) I will have to recommend you fight fire with fire. I like to see SoaSE as  Water, Fire, Earth and Air game (or Rock paper Scissors, whatever). His tactic of Heavy Cruisers and Kol's could be countered with a fleet of Marza's (one or two, Radiation Bomb and Incendiary Shell upgrades, Missile Barrage if possible), Lots of Hoshiko's and LRM's, with a few Garda's, Kodiak's, and Dunov's.

I doubt I helped since you're Vasari, but anything's worth a shot.

Xer0 \^/

Sounds like the primary issue is that he has a far more advanced and powerful empire, and exactly what kind of units he's using is more or less irrelevant.  You'd be equally screwed if those were Javelis LRM or Carriers.  With such a severe numerical advantage, TEC is going to be very difficult to beat regardless of what he's doing.  Instead, you need to focus on your early game to better match his advancement and progress, and pressure him so he can't get his ideal economy running.  If you can match him for numbers, TEC is a lot less intimidating in the late-game.

That fleet is actually quite weak and poorly structured given its cost, so it really sounds to me that your big problem is being outnumbered.  He's got way too many capital ships for how many frigates he has, and he has no hoshikos.  He could make that a lot stronger just by choosing slightly different unit proportions.  Basically, the battle was over before the first shots were fired, and he doesn't even need to play seriously at this point to beat you.

The one thing I will suggest is to lean heavily on the Stikulus Subverter against HC-based fleets.  This support cruiser can disable large numbers of enemy units, and the relatively short-range of the heavy cruiser causes them to cluster up a bit and renders them vulnerable to this shutdown.  This can remove a lot of the enemy's firepower while simultaneously preventing them from retreating.  Absolutely brutal in the hands of an expert, and something you definitely want to use.

This is going to take a long time for him to do, and if his fleet is small in the duration you should have more than sufficient window of opportunity to get your own competing economy operational and attack him before he even reaches the highest-tier economic upgrades.  What you need to be able to do is compete in the economic race until the opportunity comes to attack; TEC will have some advantages here, but you don't need to match him, just keep up.  If you can bring out a Vasari fleet about 80% his strength, that should be enough to give you a fighting chance.

The best recommendation I have is to stay lean and focus on colonizing rapidly.  You should be able to manage one new colony acquisition every 3 minutes on average.  You should cut back on technology and infrastructure to maintain your rapid colonization and a fleet to protect it.  As Vasari, rushing into more advanced stuff like refineries, broadcast centers, or trade ports is foolish.  Avoid investing heavily in defenses this early, since you want to push your borders forward. 

AI's, particularly at "hard" difficulty and below, are very slow, inflexible, and worthless as conventional allies.  I'd be more inclined to wipe them out in order to take their assets for myself and use their units as experience to level up my capital ships, keeping one alive for pacts.  You'll need to be able to stand on your own, expand faster, and get an economy rolling sooner.

Well it sounds to me that neither of you are really competitive/meta game players (needing to get the increased logistics upgraded for HC's should be irrelevant if you are expanding as fast as you can, and no player should have anywhere near half their fleet supply be capital ships), which is entirely fine. But I'm going to guess this means that you can improve your game substantially just by learning some veteran techniques to assist with rapid expansion, resource management etc. without really changing tactics. Just do a search for those things and you should find plenty of threads or ask for specifics.

As for unit tactics for Vasari, Subverters should do wonders against a HC spam. Wait until they get relatively close together (attacking a starbase perhaps?) and you should be able to disable a good portion of his fleet (I'd practice macroing it in single player though, you want to make sure you can pull it off before alerting him to your new strategy). Make sure you are maxing out phase missile research so your Assailants and bombers (if you don't dock them) can take out the Kols faster. You should use mostly carriers for your capital ships since they can both repair your ships or spam bombers depending on which you need more.

Sry, I wasnt descriptive enough, his fleets arent only kols and HC, he has a few other caps as well as about 1:5 repair ships to HC's, as well as a good number of LRM's. The AI we play with are Unfair difficulty, so rushing them is tough since they cheat (HC's and carriers by their 3rd planet? yeah right). I simply have to get SB's up to counter AI rushes as well as OP early pirates. My next strat I will try is a couple Carrier caps, as well as maybe a few carrier-frigates with all bombers. I tend to avoid this cause 15-30 fighters will slaughter almost any number of bombers along with the Kol's. 

Basically, rushing is too difficult when I have to worry about early game AI and pirates, as well as us playing on Large/Huge maps. Maybe TEC just out-class Vasari in this scenario.

Turn off the Pirates!

They are broken.

Okay, he's within the "sweet spot" for hoshiko proportions, and those LRM's are rock solid units as well.  If he's got a few gardas to round it out, then his only real issue is that he's capital ship happy.  Again, I reiterate that you need to focus your attention on the early-game to better keep up with him.

Diplomacy pirates are nasty business, and I'd really recommend turning them off.  If you insist on playing with them, your best bet is probably to sacrifice some strike craft just when the pirate raid is forming.  Send some fighters to fly over some militia gardas, which should get them killed in short order.  This will cause some of your bounty to deplete, reducing the chance of you being the pirate raid victim, and all the while draining bounty someone placed on you.  To top it off, it's not real damage; those strike craft are replaced for free anyways. 

Yeah, unfair is where the AI starts to get serious.  Still slow to react and inflexible, but their resource advantage is well worth your time and effort to befriend them.  Still definitely rushable; as Vasari try sneaking a starbase onto their homeworld.

Not necessarily.  Use some Sentinels to back up your bombers.  Manually maneuver your bombers to get the enemy fighters to fly over your sentinels.  If you have enough, you should kill the fighters faster than they can kill your bombers.  If you manually manage your attack runs to avoid putting too many bombers in Kol range at the same time, you can deal a lot of damage without exposing yourself to his full firepower.

While TEC does have an early-game advantage, Vasari has a significant late-game advantage.  The problem is that you're fall so far behind that you can never catch up and the TEC just rolls you.  The problem is you're being outplayed in the early-game, and that's where you need to focus on improving your game plan.

If you log onto Ironclad Online and start playing in the PvP games (such as the 5v5s) with the pros and learn how to play at that level, you'll be able to kick your friend's ass, eventually.

rush

Mmk, thanks for all the help. I just need to get out of the nostalgic mindset of long games and huge battles that were rampant in Entrenchment and vanilla. Well, the way we played thats how they were

I do like the idea of sacrificing strike craft to militia, need to try that out next game.

One thing I would think is if you have the money send as big as you possibly can planet assisn mission for the pirates at his frigate factory planet.

If he's a good player he probably has frigate factories at every planet bordering an opposing player. Also since he's TEC his starbases can produce ships as well. Third even with diplomacy's overpowered pirates its usually not a good use of resources to use pirates, which is probably this guy's biggest problem.

I still recommend Subverters, they'll disable his flak and repair frigates too. That should leave the Kols sitting ducks for Assailant fire for a few minutes, after which you can release the bombers. Again just get some practice with them first.

Or if you want a real crash course, try online as dirty suggested. You'll almost certainly lose unless you have a good team (or the other team has new online players as well), but just from watching other players (or the replay afterwards), you should get an idea of how to win.

And long battles have never been the way to win at Sins (with some exceptions of course). Things can get pretty high up in the tech tree, and fleets fairly large, but games usually don't last much longer than an hour unless its multistar. I know its fun to do epic fleet battles that span hours, but if you are doing that you aren't really playing to win. And if you aren't doing that then there isn't much we can do to help you.

Didn't exactly read all posts   but if he doesn't include ogrows en mase in his fleet 20 subverters 20 overseers and 4 Skirantra caps lvl3 or higher accompanied with fuly upgraded vasari SB and some phasic hangars and relevant phase missile research can beat any fleet that will fight in that gravity well. That is if you are good with microing and you know how is it possible to permanently disable his whole fleet.

4 level 3 skirantras can field 60 bombers and can replace them baster than kols can kite them or if kols run out of AM they are basically dead weight so I would first focus on kols so they dont get to lvl 6 or higher ......

PS

You could use phasic stabilizers to get 1 phase jump to every planet you own and you could go for returning armada which enables you to build no military labs at all to get high tier ships. Though I think 3 mil labs is a must for vasari player.

All you need to do is turtle up and hold them for long enough until you can get a fleet combo that is impossible for tec to destroy. Accompanied by kosutras ......

Actually... because you're missing assailants that's still reasonably easy to crack: massed disciples with Halcyon backup.  So long as I don't let myself get entirely locked down, the disciples sap 'em of antimatter in no time flat and leave you with just Skirantras and an Orkulus for firepower.  The Orkulus is pretty nasty, but if I can shut down all sources of healing and throw sufficient frigate-power at it, it'll fall.  With no assailants providing backup firepower, it won't kill disciples nearly fast enough.

Vasari does need assailants, and probably some sentinels for good measure, to complete the combo here.  It's still pretty nasty, though.

I tend to agree with Darvin that you are losing not because of specific fleet make up but because your friend has grown much bigger than you.  Based on what you say, he is using the AI as a buffer while using his economy to keep the pirates on you -- you have to spend money on defenses and slow your expansion while he grows unchecked.  By the time he is ready to fight you he is just steamrolling with a bottomless economy. 

It is kind of a funny thing about Sins, sometimes you have lost the game before you are even half done playing it out.  You need to either convince him to play 1v1's without pirates or figure out how you are going to make allies and have pirates work for you so you can have the same strategic advantage he is enjoying while he eco booms.  Vasari can often get a really strong resource based economy going if they can find some neutrals early on and invest in the resource techs.  Don't be afraid to sell this on the black market when you are making a lot more than you need to jump start your own economy.

Even without the rubbish Diplomatic Victory the relations side of the game is very broken in the current version.  You have to realise that the second expansion had to be altered in the beta and was then rushed out, and has only been patched once.  There are few bugs, but the game mechanics just do not work.

It is incredibly easy to get good relations with any AI, even from another faction, as they cannot achieve even a truce with each other and will therefore fall to the first suitor they get.  The sort of game you have set up it seems as if you want to proxy war with the AI, but relations with your neighbour will have solidified long before the first envoys from a remote enemy arrive.  One major problem is that the proximity factors may not be working at all, at the very best they are incredibly undervalued, so that the AI is unlikely to regard a proximate power as any more of a threat than a remote one.  But then what is and isn't bugged with relations is somewhat vague, as the mechanics are so awful.

I just wouldn't play your style of game in the current version.  TEC have relations easist because they have more use for civics labs than the other factions.  Pacts have been scarcely tested for gameplay and seem to me to suffer from the same OMG! lets have bigger numbers issue that plagued the second expansion- as an addition that relied very heavily on careful consideration of its subtle effects to be a success it was an utter failure.

What I would suggest, if you want to remain with the same two player with AI factions style, is to play Entrenchment instead.   If you just must play the latest version, the game you have set up demands a boom style, so building the right number of scouts is the first element of any Vasari plan.  But at least turn the pirates off, you're not missing anything fun there, the pirate mechanics are even worse than the relations ones!