I wanted to quote for truth, but Chrome doesn't let me. And does it really matter if the advent lrf is strongest? As long as the other races are have a strongest-of-their-kind ship, it doesn't rreeally matter. The only reason ppl think illums are OP is because lrf rules. If lrf sucked, then noone would complain about lums being the strongest lrf. So if LRF (and the other ship types) gets balanced again then the ships themselves don't need to be balanced that much.

And maybe you should also take the reseach costs into account. If I spend 5000 credits to make my destra stronger, then the TEC could buy 4 extra kodiaks (or so).

Encountered an illum masser who didn't build flak the other day.  Built carriers and laughed as his pretty illuminators got toasted.

Now, hundreds of illums backed up by dozens of flaks and guardians, while packing a high level holy trinity, now we're talking something that's > all.

The military pronouncement states:
"The key to using the army is to first investigate the enemy's situation. Look into his granaries and armories, estimate his food stocks, divine his strenghts and weaknesses, search out his natural advantages, and seek out his vacuities and fissures." Thus if the state does not have the hardship of an army in the field yet is transporting grain, it must be suffering from emptiness. If the people have a sickly cast, they are impoverished.

If they are transporting provisions for a thousand li, the officers will have a hungry look. If they must gather wood and grass before they can eat, they army does not have enough food to pass one night. Accordingly, if someone transports provisions a thousand li, he lacks one year's food; two thousand li, he lacks two years' food; three thousand li, he lacks three years' food. This is what is referred to as an 'empty state.' When the state is empty, the people are impoverished. When the people are impoverished, then the government and the populace are estranged. When the enemy attacks from without and the people steal from within. This is termed a situation of 'inevitable collapse.'

tl;dr: egrigious military budgets always leave shortcomings in other areas.

Dr.Gonzo

Not just upkeep, but your entire budget in general. If you're playing on a huge map and someone comes with the said ultimate army it means you can attack their weakly defended planets (defenses being relative to how much game time has passed). That army doesn't just take upkeep, it also takes the money to build the individual cruisers/frigates, the money to research the fleet logistics, the money to research the individual cruisers/frigates and their prerequisites, the money to build research structures, and they money to build the frigate factories. If they have such a fleet, that means they put a whole load of resources into it, which means they're definately lacking somewhere else.

So basically you're including the opportunity cost.  In practice, the opportunity cost of building something other than a warship is fairly large, since you now cannot capitalize on an enemy's vulnerabilities or defend yourself as well if you come under attack.

Actually, if there's one test I would like to see, it's a test of how long it takes each type of flak to clear out each variety of fighter squads.  That is, put 6 flaks up against 6 fighter squads (for each racial combination) and time how long it takes for them to go down.  If there's one thing the community lacks right now, it's much consensus on whose flaks are better at killing fighters and whose fighters are best at surviving flaks.  We all know fighters lose across the board, but the question is by how much.

I decided to go ahead and try the test out myself.  The flaks were moved to the center of the gravity well, and the carriers warped in (full antimatter when they departed).  The flaks were in a fleet, otherwise no micromanagement.  I considered the carriers don't for the count when all fighter squads were reduced below 20%.  I also recorded how long it took before the first fighter squad was totally wiped out.  It's worth noting that no carrier ever ran out of antimatter in these tests, even without any upgrades. 

These were my first tests:

6 Vasari Flak vs 6 Advent fighter squads
Took 1:30 to kill the first squad, 2:10 to finish them outright

6 Advent Flak vs 6 Vasari fighter squads
Took 1:45 to kill the first squad, 2:30 to finish them outright


I then repeated the test with larger armies:

12 Vasari Flak vs 12 Advent Fighter Squads:
Took 1:00 to kill the first squad, 1:35 to finish outright

12 Advent Flak vs 12 Vasari Fighter Squads
Took 0:30 to kill the first squad, 1:15 to finish outright


Unfortunately, the Vasari fighters started acting very weird in the last test and stopped doing passes, instead slowing down and staying in range of the flaks.  The Advent fighters did not do this, so a comparison may not be valid.  Their behaviors were the same in the first test, however.  I'm going to do some tests with upgrades then edit in the results.

Edit:  upgraded test.

Vasari upgrades included hull upgrade (+13%), armour (+2.0), and charged missiles.

Advent upgrades included hull upgrade (+20%), and laser damage (+15%)

These accurately reflect the availability and preference of upgrades for their respective factions.  The results were identical for both factions (and the Advent and Vasari ships behalved the same way this time).  I only did a 12 vs 12 test.  It took 0:30 to kill the first squad, 1:00 for all squads to be dead.

Edit:  fully upgraded test

This time, I upped the size of the fleets further to 24 fighters and 24 flaks.  The results were virtually identical to the partial upgrade test I did a while back (except one unlucky Vasari squadron got toasted on its first pass, but I chock that one up as a fluke).  Both fleets of fighters were defeated at the 1:30 mark.  Seems the fact that Vasari flaks only get +20% damage upgrades is cancelled out by Vasari fighters having an extra armour upgrade.

I don't think I'll do any more of these.  I can plainly see that even slight variation in the positioning and movement are having huge effects here.  I repeated a few of the above tests and got differing results (although the 6-flak test was consistant when I tried it again) with exactly the same setup.  It seems once there's about 10 flaks and fighters it just becomes a big jumble, and the randomness of whether a flak has a clean shot or not counts a lot more than the actual combat strengths of the units.  I guess that in and of itself is a result, eh?

Unfortunately, the "no micro" case is unrealistic enough as it is.  A "hold position" case is just way out there, becuase no one uses this stance when there are flaks on the field.  Kind of pointless to test what would happen if fighters just stood still in the presence of flaks, when no one uses them like that.

Then we have the issue of flaks gun ports.  Flak gun ports face and fire in multiple directions.  This is to give them an advantage against those fast-moving fighters.  Unfortunately, if I'm to use hold ground it may be impossible for me to replicate accurately the configuration of flaks and fighters to get the same gun ports firing in each test.  Moreover, the validity of the tests may be broken simply based on too many or too few gun ports firing.

In any case, aside from that small 6 v 6 test (which, as you noticed, the fighters lasted WAY WAY longer) the fighters eventually ended up doing short and slow passes, staying within flak range for much longer and died out very quickly at that point.  The biggest source of error in my tests was that when they stopped doing their long and fast and swapped to short and slow passes was unpredictable, randomly based on the configurations the flaks just happened to be in.

The lesson I choose to take from this is that fighters need to be micromanaged, but on the flip-side if you manage them well it doesn't matter which kind you're using.

I actually do this ALL the time and it requires much heavier micromanagement, the trade off is that strikecraft live SIGNIFICANTLY longer because the flak can only use a fraction of their power against them, and the same can be said vs other strike craft. Stationary fighters will cream moving ones and bombers due to their attack behavior. Half the time SC exhibit a linear pass while the other half they circle and fire. Against a linear pass, stationary fighters lose a bit of effectiveness, but against circling SC the stationary fighters gain a HUGE advantage and all moving SC will eventually exhibit a circle and fire behavior.

And this is far from a "no micro" situation, its hard (but quite rewarding) to use SC when you can't issue an attack queue for them, and you have to keep them in range of enemy frigates without issueing attack orders. They kill things much faster when stationary, but you can't choose exactly what they'll attack

If you don't believe me, give it a try, have moving fighters attack ones set to hold position and see who comes out on top. Then try them against flak frigates and see how much longer they live for.'

I use it quite often, but have found the best thing to do is to have a mixture of moving and stationary for defense (80% hold position 20% attack local area) and micro manage them to stand still against stationary groups of frigates but then follow and attack when the frigates move or retreat.

I was watching both the icons and the squadron %'s (by selecting all the carriers and holding my cursor over their strike craft management button.  I could plainly see the %'s of each squad fall down so I knew when they were taking attacks)

Yes Dresda, it was one flak per squadron in all cases.  I never said one flak per carrier, and if I did it was a typo.