all these patches and even an expansion later, and were back to square one... nice.  Sure looks like devs are stuck in a rut

Modds to the rescue

Not entirely; carriers are certainly stronger than they were back then (bombers in particular; try to counter bombers with flak alone and you're liable to lose your capital ships, and very likely to lose some labs).  That said, illums and lrf in general haven't changed... and perhaps the biggest problem is the fact that they literally haven't changed.

don't forget your SCOUT spamming

The advent in late game are pretty much unstoppable... a well balanced late game fleet can eat fleets twice or even three times its size with little to no loss of ships.

The TEC and vasari can't do this, but they have other things going for them. Phase missles and uber-eco mostly.

Illums are powerful because they are the hardest lrf to get, but yes, they are overpowered.

The vasari need more ooompf, the TEC are alright, and the advent just kill and kill..

Hopefully the next patch   but that's what we said three patches ago...

I played with EadTaes on his mod today.  It does work sometimes, but you have to have people on your friend list.

Things are the same, but different. 

In the world that spawned this thread the LRM was the long range frigate of death, not the Illuminator (Pre 1.04).  Illums were anti-capital damage ships back then and could actually be fought with cobalt spam (I did it a couple times..hehe).  Illums were still effective once you massed em enough, but they were a bit harder to get rolling.  Advent end game fleets were actually harder to fight due to the pre-nerf Progen and Radiance, and Repulse was a double edged sword that could throw enemy ships halfway across a gravwell.

Vasari had the familiar early game rush advantage and serious mid game challenges that they do today -- with the caveat that if you survived and teched up to either Subverters or Returning Armada, Vasari became very hard to stop.  I liked to get both and fondly recall one epic 5v5 game where Raging Amish was across the map and he killed off my team while I killed off his team on my side of the map.  These are heavily nerfed now, which is why Vasari players tend to rely on their Starbases.

Long Range is king again because while carriers are more effective... so is flak!  HC's are effective if you aren't fighting Advent, but since there are plenty of Advent, you have to rely more on your LRF...of which the Illuminator is the current king.  Bombers are also harder to stop than fighters, which can make bomber fleets effective at stopping HC's.  The game is more balanced in some ways, but not in others...chiefly in that it is very hard for any race to counter a mature end-game Advent fleet right now.

Yeah. Cykur. You pretty much hit it on the nose, and while I look at it differently, we come to the same point.

Personally, i see it like this. In 1.05 ( which is when I wrote this, I feel like singing "those were the days" when we think about 1.04 ), the Illum got massively buffed and it created problems. Fighters were too expensive to counter them, and even if a person had sufficient fighters, flak were so strong they eliminated that threat.

Since then, we saw carriers get about a 15% cost cut I think it was, and flak got a damage nerf somewhere in the 1.1X range. That's why 1.1 was the closest we had to balance. While Carriers were definitely the best option for the fleet, they weren't necessarily OP. They needed a slight fix yes, but then the devs brought the game back to square one by doing:

1. For the life of me I can't find it in the change logs, but somewhere flak either got buffed or they were uber-strong against fighters to begin with. Either way, flak currently wipe the floor with fighters (as they should).

2. Carriers were slowed down. This one still boggles me. LRFS can currently chase down carriers. That's just wrong.

So yeah. Different scenario, but the end result is the same. Illums = all powerful.

The only thing that's changed really is that flak no longer are a sufficient counter to lrf. They used to do enough dps to do the job (that's also why flak were so good against bombers), but nay. They have been reduced to the role of anti-fighter, which is fine imo.

Just play with mods, the Mad Scientist Mod 2.5 is a good place to start and its SO much more satisfying!

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thats briliiant, and far better then my idea, which was like rise of nations. I have yet to go online though since im still working figureing out how to play the basics of all three races, so please ingore me or at least don't flame me ...