First off I never said anything about "spamming novaliths".  Even with my proposition, multiple novaliths would be able to kill foff the population of a given planet.  My change just makes it so a single novalith can't bottom out the population of a planet for a single faction that relies on that population for defense.  The problem is that it only takes a single novalith to negate wail of the Sacrificed.  if it at least took 2-3 it would be fine.

What economic buff?  I never argued any such thing. The entire focus of this thread has nothing to dow ith economy.  It has to do with Wail of The Sacrificed and the fact that with evena  single novalith cannon out, advent rebels are denied a core defensive tool as the guy with the novalith cane asily kill off your population from a safe distance before attacking, effectively neutering Wail of the Sacrificed.

And it's not so simple as trading one planet for another- the starbase is only going to take a frontline planet. The novalith can take any planet, frontline or backline at the TEC player's leisure.  Also the starbase costs a lot more the the novalith with culture upgrades(and with culture upgrades will be a realtively weak defense) if investing i novaliths with TEC's strong economy is asking to get bomber-rushed, what do you think an even greater investment in a culture bomb with advent's weak economy accomplishes?

Even with my suggested changes, the novalith cannon would still have devestating economic consequences(the max pop debuff & trade debuff alone ensure that).  If the opponent wants to just cause economic damage they'd just be spreading novalith shots around anyway.  Due to the population debuff, my proposition barely affects the first novalith shot to a given planet(most of the damage is no regeneratable due to reduced pop cap).

So what does my change do? It prevents multiple shots to the same planet frome easily killing the entire planetary population, essentially disabling Wail of the Sacirficed.  This is not primarily an economic buff.  If the TEC player wants to cause economic damage they only need to spread their shots around, hitting multiple planets and my change will make vitrtually no difference.

This is more a change about keeping the advent rebel's main faction specific defense mechanism at least partially intact against player with a novalith cannon.  At present with even a single novalith cannon a TEC player can keep a single world under 30 population at all times- this is not he best way to cause economic damage, it does however utterly disable Wail of the Sacrificed.

Honestly you're putting all sorts of words in my mouth.  it seems to me you're responding to em as though I'm a generic "novalith OP" thread and showering me with generic "novaliths are balanced" responses.  You assume I'm making standard arguments such as "novalith spam too strong" and "the economic damage needs to be countered" even when I never once touched the topic of novalith economic damage in this thread.  It leads me to believe you've written your responses without even reading/thinking about the OP.  This thread is about one thing and one thing only: making Wail of the Sacrificed useful against all enemies, including an opponent who has a novalith out- not a  novalith spammer, a guy who has just one novalith cannon out- at present it isn't if they have half a brain.

beta 2a is out : Many techs have low tiers which are good buffs.. Don't expect a Novalith solution anytime soon-maybe never for the advent. 

@ riddleking

Riddleking is right, you know

@ bilun

don't fall for his troll like ways!!

The solution is to build a starbase with a government backup and reinforce your planets with bunkers. I tested this all night and was attacked all the time by super cannons but it didn't effect my income at all. I had 1 million credits after 12 hours while owning only 6 planets.

Your doing something wrong.

It does affect your income, but if the AI is too timid to attack you and actually destroy stuff on your side you won't notice. A human player would try to bleed you out.

...

Then again, a human player would wipe the floor with you if you tried to wait him out till you have enough eco saved up to attack, even without the Novas.

I don't expect a novalith solution, did you even bother reading my response?  Having a dependable partial populace for the purpose of wail of the sacrificed is not a novalith solution.   Most of novalith's economic damage comes from it's debuffs(the population damage helps, but the greatest damage comes from the -40% max population & -50% trade penalty).

 Allowing a the advent rebels to reliably have 50-100 population on their desert/terran worlds to sacrifice despite pepeated bombardment from a single novalith cannon is far from a novalith "solution"(even with my proposition, 2 novaliths would have no problem dropping planets to 0 population, and 1 would keep high pop planets on average about 200 pop below their cap).  A bit of a mitigation perhaps(and primarily a mitigation for the purpose of maintaining some population for wail of the sacrificed rather then preserving a large portion of the planet's economy).

Heck, the Advent loyalists already have a population generation booster(assimilated populace) and the're fine for it.  It's not like a population generation booster inherently breaks the advent.

I'm starting to wonder why I even both posting these responses, my opposition clearly doesn't bother reading them.  My entire argument has been on allowing advent rebels to have some population left after a few novalith shots to sacrifice with Wail of the sacrificed.  How the heck does aux government help against that?

This entire thread has absolutely nothing to do with novalith's planetary damage, it only is discussing the population damage component's interaction with Wail of the Sacrificed.  Your post has absolutely 0 relevance to the topic of discussion.  Tell me, how exactly does your "solution" address this issue?

Sorry if I'm getting a bit exasperated, but it is utterly frustrating to try to debate a topic when my opposition persistently responds as though I am arguing points I have not touched.  It's like people want to use a certain counterargument so they simply pretend I used the argument for which the counter would be valid regardless of what points I actually argued.

The entire point of this thread is that advent rebels need a way of preserving some populace to sacrifice with Wail against TEC players w/ novalith and yet every single person to disagree with does so by saying that there shouldn't be a counter to the economic or planetary damage effects of novalith as though that were the primary focus of my proposition.

Well read the tittle of the thread, it is about Novalith, if you want to talk abotu wail make a wail thread.

This is a wail thread- I know,  I made the thread after all.  The thread is specifically about the interaction between wail and novalith(and the fact that because of wail the advent rebels need a means of protecting some of their population against novalith bombardment).  Often threads discuss very specific issues too specific to be adequately described in the relatively short title.  Consequently titles only give a vague summary of the idea of the thread whereas the OP fleshes out the specific of the discussion topic.

Just because the title of the thread has the word "novalith" in it doesn't mean the entire content of the thread is about countering every aspect of novalith.  If someone is not willing to take the time to read the OP to see what the thread is actually about they shouldn't respond as they are missing critical information about the topic of the thread.  

Devising your response entirely based on your expectations of the thread from the title only leads to mistakes such as this.

Thread tittle -- > Advent Rebels really need a means of defending against novaliths

 Then big wall of mislleading text.

sorry I see no wailing except yours (that was a lame joke).

Ok so you want to have a super spamming of doom button... How about NOPE!

The Tech have to build back a Sb to have this AoE (the big red button), and you have a still have a Sb that will still do massive AoE in the same well (the asteroid upgrade)... I think not, you can destroy a fleet with this power. It as to give you a back lash like the TEch as to build a new starbase and queue two upgrades (and that Aoe hurts him too, all id building and is own fleet, not sure about wailing doom if it hurts your own fleet) but in the end such power shoudl have a very high back draw..

Else why not just mass suicide any well as soon as a ship jumps in? There as to be a consequence a dire one because you can wipe out fleets, by gettign too mcuh population back you will be abel to trigger it too soon preventing someone who as backed you in a cornor to send a split fleet that is abel to steam roll you but you would be abel to destroy it all the time... if it is a tie suiciding a world to get a fleet is a good sacrifice.

Rebellion is about speeding up this game, when a titan falls you are done. If you can;t follow the Super weapon race your dead, if you can't your dead and every race can (maybe a balance need is required but not a total nerf).

cheers

Moreover even if the title was poorly chosen it would be th title that's "misleading" rather then the text.  Moreover it's not a wall of text- it is broken up into sections & pararaphs.  it is "a lot of text", but that's more an problem with your lack of patience then with the formatting and design of the post as the term wall of text generally implies.

And for a blast comparable to a TEC starbase the advent player has to be generating population unhindered for 25-40 minutes(that's how long it takes to generate 200-340 population.  

because as I said it takes 25-40 minutes to fully regenerate your populace.  My change does absolutely nothing to improve population generation after using Wail of the sacrificed.  it only regenerates population after you suffer enemy bombardment.

The simple fact of the matter is that wail will have to be balanced so it can be dealt with without novaliths regardless(so all races can deal with it), so TEC aren't going to NEED novaliths to deal with the advent rebels.  So why then should the TEC be able to entirely negate the benefit of one of the advent rebel's most important new technologies?

It's like if some faction got a tech that automatically shuts down any 2nd Starbase in a well they are attacking(negating one of the TEC loyal's greatest advantages) or were given a technology which made them entirely immune to novalith shots.  Key faction-specific technologies shouldn't be made useless by building a single structure which is available to an entire race.

I fully agree with you. One faction specific tech should never be completely countered by a single tech/structure from an opposing faction. Wail of the Sacrificed opens up a lot of opportunities for some interesting strategies for Advent Rebel players, but as it stands, these strategies will never come into fruition if an Advent Rebel's populace continuously gets nuked with no chance of growth. I support your idea to change Cleanse and Renewal into a tech that will increase population growth after planetary bombardment (from structure or ship).

I think that you made a very good comparison here.

after about 4 months the DS mod will likley have something that addresses this problem up and running.

ask them about it.  it'll just require some programming and a copy of the planetary shields graphic.

they'll probably go for it.  I know it would be a great addition to have some novalith defense.

Sareth is right you know,

@bilun

don't fall for my troll like ways.

Nop-your military has all the abilities you need (and more lower race specific techs) to allow you to capture more planets.

Lets be realistic for a change because sins is also a multiplayer game-not just a single player game where you want to play against ai's and ask for buffs. 

...and edit the title-you sound confused: You want a buff for the advent yet you don't want us to say that's what you mean? Say something meaning full? At the end of the day populations and people die from all kinds of things-some are sieged upon, some convert and some simply wish to mini-dumb.

novalith warheads don't move terribly fast and you are alerted when they launch.  if you have one heading to a borderworld, use Wail of the sacrificed before your planet is nuked.  hopefully, you have enduring devotion on it when you do this.

You are not alerted of where they are headed though; it would be a gamble.  Even if you guess right you're still letting the enemy choose when to use wail.  It changes little as the opponent will still use novaliths to discharge Wail harmlessly when their fleet isn't anywhere nearby.

Wail of the Sacrificed is suppose to be a threat that makes opponents hesitate to commit their entire fleet to an attack on the advent rebel's high pop worlds.  It can't achieve that function as long as the TEC has a means of removing that threat completely while their entire fleet is at a safe distance.  Novaliths should mitigate Wail to be sure(the very existance of the -40% pop cap debuff ensures that they do regardless)- they just shouldn't be so easily able to negate it entirely.

if you move the view around you can easily find out where the novalith is headed.  Just move the angle around until the novalith pic reverses.  whichever planet was in front of it when it does that is the target

actually... wouldn't it make sense that the population sees the warhead coming and sacrifices itself to help the cause?

In other words, why not make wail auto trigger if you get hit by a warhead? both sides get the desired outcome: a dead lifeless world with nothing but dead bodies on it.

Ok, I was definitely wrong on that point, but my other points stand.  the TEC still be surely keep their fleet clear of the blast even if you do reactively use wail.

the point is that for Wail to really fufill it's role, the Advent player needs to be in full control of when it is used.

Frankly the TEC player being able to harmlessly discharge it with their fleet at a safe distance is really not much different from simply being able to prevent Wail from being used at all.

Wail is supposed to make the opponent hesitate to commit their entire fleet to attacking high pop advent rebel worlds.  This purpose is not accomplished if a TEC player can force the advent player to use wail when their fleet is out of range then send in their entire fleet as would be the case with the strategy you suggest.

On the subject of Wail of the Sacrificed, just heard the new sound effect it has and it's creepy as hell, I approve.

Indeed

Have a beer all 'round

If that's the main issue, then bank population losses from bombing. Surely the Advent can come up with a soul battery... engine side all you need is population killed accumulator for each RA gravity well (pretty low overhead) and a check on the total damage to make sure it's under the necessary cap (also low overhead, not that this is going to be spammed. Displaying banked "souls" on the Temples would be a bonus.

No messing around with population growth required. TEC still gets to decide when you get bombed, you still get to decide when to unload Wail.

Here's an example of how this would work. To keep the math easy, let's work though a Tier 4 Terran planet with ~280 pop.

• Before bombing, you have 280 Pop to Wail with.
• You get Novalith'd -> Bank 150 "souls" immediately, plus any extra damage from the ceiling dropping on the pop cap (let's assume none for this case)
• So you have 130 Pop planet side now.
• But you banked 150 so you can still do 150 + 130 = 280 pop worth of Wail.

Suppose you get Novalith'd twice?

• Now you have 0 pop planetside
• 280 banked
• Still 280 worth of Wail.

Naturally you can't bank more than the population cap, and any use will still cost you the planet.

The soul bank would need to be zero'd if all the Temples get destroyed, obviously. Probably if you lose control of the gravity well too, but SBs solve that problem.

it's worth noting that the novalith is considered a superweapon, but Wail of the Sacrificed is not necessarily. While you can activate it to make use of population you are about to lose anyway, there are, however, other circumstances in which you might want to initiate Wail of the Sacrificed.

That said, the concept of a population resurrection tech is a cool idea and would synergize very well with Wail of the Sacrificed.

Exactly, crisaron...   I see no need in changing the current system.  Build your starbase, protect against losing the planet, and move on.  Your population will rebuild with time, and you should have other high pop planets.....if you're getting shelled at all of them then you've let your opponent build too many guns.   I see no reason at all to make any chnages with this.  The Advent Rebels are fine just the way they are.  Wait until the Vasari are out and I think we'll be hearing far fewer cries to nerf the superweapons.....

Just re-reading the thread today when I picked up on this. It's not included in the alert text, but if you highlight the superweapon alert it highlights the target planet. No gambling required! Pic below shows what kind of highlighting to expect, the warhead and target planet get different highlights.

What about phase missile research the advent have that nerfs the phase missiles?