Advent is fun, but you really do have to use mixed forces with them. As long as the shields stay up the enemies go down. though with the carrier cap you really don't have to worry about fighters. hit a button and they have fun on the ride back.

Most of my fleets start with the BB/CV/Mothership combo 15 to 20 disciples, 15+ cruiser carriers, 5 guardians, 5 subjugators. Scale that fleet up evenly as I go, with a second fleet for planetary bombing and a similar sized third fleet for fast defense, but without the subjugators since repair plats help out there.

It always depends what the opponant is fielding at the time. With research all ships can have their place.

Frigates, I usualy have up to 25 and sometimes even more Illuminators with approximately 1 Defender per 5 Illuminator. I will have the odd selection of Disciples along with a couple Purge vessles to cause a little confusion (and give tactical options during combat).

Guardians are a big must in my fleets. I like to have at a minimum 1 per Capital ship. However the more the merrier as they really help the survivability of the more valuable assets. I am sure the Subjugator is really useful but I just rely less on them in fleet composition (but tag a few along). The rest of the force will be made up of Crusaders in a big way. These ships are really powerful and eat through frigates and Capital ships are vulnerable to masses of them. Also they live through a lot!

As for Capital ships, what can I say other than I love the Mothership and Battleship the most. They are uber strong ships in tandom and supplement each other very well. The Carrier is great as a Flagship when the ship gets experienced. I'm not a huge fan of the Battlecruisers but the Revelation variety seems more useful than the Rapture.

At the end of the day though, if the opponant is fielding a lot of fighters I field far more Defense ships than Illuminators (which I will stop making). So although it depends on what the opponant is doing, I can't help but prefer Guardians and strong Capital ships. With mixed abilities of these ships you can usualy keep high level Battleships alive almost indefinitly against far supperior numbers.

The last game I played (9 random hard AI + me in a random huge galaxy), I had a level 10 Battleship stay alive against almost an entire AI's fleet when outnumbered nearly 10 to 1. Although most of the fleet including the Battleship finally succumbed they stayed alive for so long the planet lived through it and when a main response fleet got to the battle they finished off the AI and then went on to quickly dismantel the rest of that AI's empire.

I'll have to try this thanks for the strat.

And btw, the Illuminators IMHO are very useful to have at the back of your fleet. Still, if you use them in a mobile fleet that needs to rapidly re-engage and re-deploy their manouverability can be a big problem.

But looking for other threads before starting a new is one so hard.

I absolutely love Illuminators, they're probably my favorite frigate. I find them to be insanely useful against masses of enemy frigates, however once I get Crusaders, I usually start to phase them out, but keeping them in the fleet. I beams.

well there are 2 BEFORE the subjagotr i dont use because they aint strong agasint anything i go for what their good agasint which means i can counter anything and not have my self countered instead lol