I thought the general consensus was that they blew!

It is especially crucial for advent players to scout and gather intelligence about the strategy of the opposing side and prepare for a counter, as advent lacks in early game muscle due to its high tech requirements on long-ranged frigates.

I found that small 1 v 1 maps are usually big enough (6+ planets between homeworlds) for advent to be viable. Unless your opponent is crazy rushing (in which case you should forgo expansion to rush defenders... it's usually easy to tell what your opponent is doing by his labs constructed), you might even have time to tech up to trade posts. The maps where advent truely sucks are 2v2 or 3v3, where the advent side could get pincer'd very early in game, as there simply isn't a fight between disciples and LRMs. Even though defenders are on tech level 2, it costs alot more than LRMs early on (the difference in cost diminishes as you hit the ship population cap as defenders have very low supply cost), and it is likely that you will lose the fight before long.

Mid game is where advent truely shines at, with defenders / illuminators your AE damage would rip everything apart with Malice and proper fleet positioning. If you weren't aware of this, the lack of FF of illums/defenders reduces overall mitigation and combines nicely with Malice. Speaking of which, Malice is underused by many players who play advent. It is a far more effective ability compared to shield regen, and is quite comparable to volatile nanite at level 3. To demonstrate the effectiveness of malice, I cleared a pirate star once with 20 ships, a mixture of disciples and illums, without losing a single frigate with a level 5 mothership on Malice autocast. I personally advise maxing out Malice before raising shield regen to level 2.

Like OP pointed out, guardian requires hefty investment, and I believe that its use is quite situational. Crusaders, on the other hand, are simply not needed. Your illums already do capital damage (100% damage on capitals, heavy cruisers, and buildings), and crusaders simply do not add anything else to your game. Opposing team might try to counter illums with LRMs / Flaks. While LRMs simply get slaughtered by malice, Flaks AE damage can easily be countered by shield regen... not to mention that illums do far better against flaks compared to LRM/assailants.

Drone carriers are too easily countered for its own good. Against good players, forget it.

Personally, I have found little use of radiance battleship, as I find that maxing malice ASAP is usually the dominant strategy in games where I am in offense.

Here are what the stats say:

Illuminators have a contradicting design. They're supposed to be long-range frigates, which mean that they're supposed to hang back and fire at one target at a time. But then they also have their weaponry spread over 3 beam guns on the front and sides - which imply that they should fly right into the heart of the battle and shoot 3 targets at once to bring their actual firepower to bear. They may be useful though to storm capital ships and support cruisers.

The Disciple is the cheapest and weakest ship of it's class, but it can come useful later on as a pure antimatter tank to steal and transfer AM to capital ships and cruisers.

The Seeker Vessel is more durable and has equal firepower to the TEC scout, and has a unique suicide-ramming attack, but it doesn't have the neat abilities like the TEC scout which can place time-bombs on structures and deploy spy satellites. And the Vasari scout isn't even worth comparing to these two(being better at... everything).

The Iconus Guardian has it's useful Repulsion and Shield Projection abilities, but they don't stack. They could take a third of the damage off a friendly ship's head, and could keep a heavy cruiser out of firing range, so they're useful but maybe not for the early game. Enough of them with the requisite antimatter upgrades and Disciple support could provide a round-the-clock repulsion field and shield bubble, so the Guardian can equal it's equivalents(the Robotics Cruiser and Subverter).

The Destra Crusader is stronger than the Kodiak, but also more expensive, and without upgrades, it is weaker(but cheaper) than the Skarovas Enforcer. If someone were to fully upgrade the Crusader with all it's Plasma, Hull, Shields and Armor upgrades, it would be the strongest ship in it's class. But the Plasma weapons technologies would be very expensive and would give benefits only to the Crusader and the Progenitor Mothership. None of the other Advent frigates/cruisers/strikecraft use Plasma, although it is used as a secondary weapon on the Radiance Battleship.

The Aeria Drone Host is the cheapest of the light carriers but is also the flimsiest - with no armor, weak shields and mediocre hull strength. However, it is the least research intensive and carries the strongest strike craft squadron in the early game. But as time progresses and technology levels increase, the Vasari catch and surpass the Advent in strike craft strength and wouldn't have much difficulty at all in nullifying the air-power of any opponent. The Advent drones always remain stronger than the TEC strike craft as far as weaponry is concerned, but they are the most vulnerable to flak and would get torn apart by Gardas.

The Defense Vessel is again the cheapest of it's class but defensively the weakest. It has more firepower than the Garda and Sentinel, but it doesn't have the shot frequency of the Garda or the longer-ranged shield-piercing area-effect missiles of the Sentinel.

As for their capital ships, the Radiance Battleship has nice abilities(Detonate Antimatter, Animosity, Cleansing Brilliance) and with technology and level upgrades may even be able to beat the Kol in a straight fight. The Halcyon also has good abilities like Amplify Energy Aura(boosts energy weapons' cool-down and damage), Telekinetic Push and it's drone swarm. And he Progenitor is famous for it's colonizing, Malice, shield-recharge and Resurrection abilities, but also has some heavy broadside armament and thick shielding.

o/ Hunting, wheres that 1v1 you promised me

Been tinkering with advent recently and they do seem to be the weakest initially for the first 30mins of the game, though hey, everyone is pretty weak. Here's a few strategies for general scenarios

1v1 (pirates or no pirates)
Comments are put down in no particular order.
- Upgrade planet, build cap ship yard, build conlony ship (let charge) then 3 scouts immediately, build cap ship (meh, generally just pick a random one), build temple of harmony x2 as soon as.

First planet - usually asteroid
- Clear with cap, have colony ship on edge of grav well and warp ship when last npc is 1/2 hull, conlonise and immediately upgrade, build temple of harmony when funds availiable. When conlonised, warp conlony ship back to homeworld and have it sit ready to warp to next planet.

- Build 2-8 disciples at homeworld (up to first fleet cap max as soon as)

Second planet - usually ice or volcano
Note: if its a terran or desert i try and avoid unless the spawn is pretty weak but then if its the only one jump planet near you you don't have a choice.

- Send cap in first to aggro, then warp in dicisples to pick off lrm, colbolt etc pirate varients. Conlonise planet, upgrade as soon as.

All the time you have to be scouting for the other player, control your scouts, find out what he's doing, what stage he is at, how many labs he has, etc etc all important info. Also, how he is expanding for the map layout because on some random maps this will mean early conflict, on others - if the player is greedy - it will mean he overstretches.

Third planet - could be anything
- Generally, take planets as fast as poss and have them making money, with the third temple of harmony up start to put trade ports up forming the longest line you can forsee yourself holding comfortably (if you don't understand how trade works, play a 1v0 game and figure it out).
- Culture: should upgraded have temple of communion up in your capital and also built a trade port. Advent get culture at tier 2 (bonus) and it helps reduce waste in the planets near to your capital, just build the structure myself, dont upgrade spread rate.
- Buy any needed crystal/ore off the market to build upgrade planets and ports, then start aim to build 3 temples of hostility somewhere (either at upgraded planets or new planets). Research Illunimators as soon as you have tier one's reasrched up, then research their damage tech once.

Priorities are: keep socuting, keep scouting, upgrade planets and build trade ports as well as upgrade fleet. Advent don't get any really useful ore and resource upgrades like tec and vassari early game so money will come from planets upgraded initially.

Fifth/sixth ish planet - to end game
- By now you have the map scoped and should be running regular runs through his territory to see where he is, what he is doing, where he is expanding. As such, you need to pick a planet close to him (2 jumps out that he is going to expand towards)from which your going strike from - plan to put 2 frig factories there.

Once this planets frig factories are lite up the main spam begins at which point research the seige frig (yes, i know its a tier one but why do you need it early game?), the anti fighter frig and associated shield/damage tech.

The main strategy is expand fast, upgrade planets fast, move on and scout, scout scout.

Let battle commence
Lets say im playing myself, i would be doing the exact same thing, meaning there is now a front behind which are planets with multiple frigate factories and solid trade port/planet economies. This is the part of the game where you can't really plan, its all up to you to win or you to lose (equally for the opposition).

- Keep your eyes open. If no scout enters your double/tripple frigate factory planet then he doesn't know its there. Keep building until he either finds it or starts to clear near by planets. Depnding on layout you can either plough 1-2 jumps into his empire (destroy labs, ports, mineral/ice nodes, construction bots etc) or take him at the planet just as he is about to clear it/conlonise it.
- Always have something building in frigate factories
- Side note: you homeworld factory can also come in handy, a mixed force of say 5-10 illuminators, 20 diciples makes for a very annoying side distraction is sent to a neighbouring enemy system if it looks like you are lossing the frigate spam battle.
- If (as last point) it does look like you are losing the frigate spam battle IMMEDITAELY set the waypoint for your factories to one planet behind and begin to amass again there as you pull back. If he follows you he will be warping into a revitalised blob of ships and you can hopefully push him back.
- If you win the frigate battle, push on.

End comments:
- Early game behaviour for advent (or any race) keeps you in the game or results in a loss, upgrade the planets nearest to you first and using culture reduce their waste to 0 then look at planets +2 jumps or more from capital planet.
- I have found Illuminators are great anti frig ships, use them to kill his firgates (i.e. lrms, or whatever).
- Another tip i would say, though depends on player, is always always build mixed fleets. I use to build, when i played tec, lrm blobs but i feel comfortable now having some anti - fighter, anti support frig and anti firgate ships with the odd guardian and drone carrier (with fighters, fighters, fighters) about.
- I don't waste time and resources building any cap ships. Yes, a 7 strong cap advent cap ship fleet would be a scary thing but i have yet to encounter any such force in 1v1 small map multiplayer. Imo they are a waste of time and resources, upgrade your frigates/planets and income than build these imo.


Wrote a bit more than i thought and probably spelling mistakes but anyway. Advent are fun to play, but a bit harder than tec and possibly vassari.

caol

Consider this my crappy reply. I'm looking forward to seeing how much less helpful you can be. Let me paraphrase your intelligent thread so far:

"Hey, these guys suck. Help me with strats. Unless you directly agree with me, or tell me what I want to hear, you all suck, and that gives me the right to belittle you."

The only redeeming part is that almost all of the responses in the thread were well stated and good-intentioned. More than you deserve.

Tea

lol. advent suck? i was playing a 2v1 game vs a vasari and TEC. tell me, if advent suck so much, why was it that i was pushing the vasari into a corner even tho he had dark armada? the only reason i lost was his ally came up and smashed me between the vasari and him. lol. advent don't suck. i believe its the end user. and if you want to know how to play 1v1 on a small map...2 mil temples. research cruiser carriers. build up disciples and focus on fighters for your carriers. that leaves you with the colonizing cap ship, about 8 disciples, 2 seekers, 4 carriers with fighters. happy ownings. the only 2 1v1s i have played couldn't keep up with that because of their LRF spamming ways. done wiping their fleet? change your fighters to bombers and take out their techs. if they start showing pressure. retreat. don't stand and fight like an idiot. go back with illums. you say illums suck? your not using them right. don't forget to have disciples. they are your main damaging unit right now. have the illums FF the cap ship. the mother ship FF on the smaller frigs and your fighters nailing their LRFs. game over. oh wait, don't be so narrow minded you don't build a defense fleet at home. and don't be so focused that you can't send your ships around to hit them in another spot. you can run a lot of fleets through a neutral party planet without any serious damage/loss. especially if you send a col frig in a few seconds after your fleet. comp goes straight for the col frig. happy hunting moron.

caol, i just read your response. thats not a 1v1 game. maybe a large map. but not small. that was a large map 1v1.

Ok, so here's an example of someone who wrote something useful:
Erres1108, even though I don't agree with a lot of what you're saying, your approach is novel, and I will test it out.

I'm not shooting down anything new, just the opposite. The whole point of the thread is to see what NEW strategies exist, and how to implement them into the build (which I'm in the process of writing).

On the other hand, here's a totally worthless response:

the only 2 1v1s i have played couldn't keep up with that because of their LRF spamming ways
happy hunting moron.

So he's played 2 1v1s, but now he's an expert. Yes. That must be the case....

..............

k.

Caol's response was misguided. No build involving temples of harmony will work. This has been tested, and it just fails. Horribly, quickly, fails.

Right now, there are two ideas that seem feasible.

Disciple and Defense + Radiance
Disciple + Illuminator + Mothership
Disciple and Carrier + Radiance

Here's what I'm worried about:

Disciple and Defense will lose outright to assailant spam, since the disciples die very quickly, and then the assailants and ff the capital ship. The defense vessels, cannot do damage to the opposing capital ship.

I've never tested strategy 2, so we'll give that a whirl. My gut feeling is, against good players who spread out their assailants, it will fail.

Disciple + carrier also seems to fail vs mass assailant/lrms, who first kill the disciples, then chase the carriers around until they die. Jury's still out on that one.

Now, let's see some more informed responses.

Dont forget to mention the gigantic economic advantage you had in our game Hunting. You always seem to omit that.

Progenitor first. Always. Their mothership is just overpowered. Way WAY better than the Akkan. The Progenitor colonize ability is stupendous, 20-60% off on planet upgrades!? WTF. That is game breakingly good. Then they get the universally useful shield regen ability. Can't go wrong with a fleetwide health buff.

The radiance is cool later in the game, after you have at least one of every "aura" ship.

The carrier has the beam cooldown "aura."
The Concentration aura ship is amazing for boosting fighter damage.

Then I mass radiances for pure DPS once I have my core 3 ships.

Forget about disciples, those are pirate/neutral fodders for early expansion. Aside from illumss, defenders should form most of what the remaining fleet is made of, as i have never seen anyone who forego LRM in their fleet composition.

Also it is quite difficult to "spread out the assailants" the way one uses to counter volatile nanite to deal with malice, since malice has 8000 range (meaning, it is impossible for assailants to shoot at the mothership while avoiding the malice effect)and illums have 4.8k range. I am not saying that spreading is totally useless; however, for spreading to have a significant effect the battle must be relatively small in scale so that there is actually room for maneuvering... Which brings out another point. Malice works alot better in big battles than in small battles, in mid sized fights where you have ~20 ships within mothership radius, level 3 malice acts like a ~500% damage buff for all allied ships for 20 seconds. In contrast, in a tiny fight with 4 ships within mothership radius, level 1 malice is "merely" a 24 percent damage buff. This exactly why one should start with at a level of shield regen/colonize before investing in malice, as there simply aren't any big battles early in game.

In the tests that I have done, abilities damage (martyrdom) does not seem to be propagated by Malice... if it were, it could well be game breaking. I didn't test with cleansing brilliance due to the time involved in leveling up another level 6 radiance battleship.

Another comment:
-------------------------------------------------------
If your opponent is someone who starts with sova embargo, 2 military labs and rushes after he had amassed 10 LRMs,it might be quite difficult to deal with as advent, for the following reasons:

1 You have to research defenders as counter (assuming you aren't dead yet), further delaying the research of illums.
2. You don't have time/resource to level up your mothership, and level 1 malice is, let's just say, not exactly devastating.
3. Very early rushing means that the scale of the battles would be tiny. Malice would provide a much smaller edge than it would otherwise.

I suppose this all signifies an early game vulnerability for advent. If the devs are going to give advent an early game buff, I wouldn't mind to see Malice get tuned down a bit

What about the smaller maps where the only readily-accessible non-asteroid worlds are Ice or Volcanic? If you don't build up to Harmony 2, are you supposed to field a game-winning fleet with nothing but your homeworld and 1 asteroid?

(Or does that strategy involve taking their asteroid by force as soon as you possibly can?)

Normal small map 1v1s involve your homeworld + 1 asteroid. People who take more usually die.

I guess that's news to people who don't 1v1

There is a big difference between pre-made maps and random maps, even if both a categorized as "small".

Hi, HuntingX! Thanks for your contributions to the board! Please see here (WWW Link) and ruminate on what it means to be an adult.

I personally like Advent the best; they're the only side I can play as and win without capital ships.

wow hunting. i said i have only played 2 1v1 to show that my post may or may not be worth a grain of salt. i've read every single post on here and very rarely do they touch upon small map 1v1. and i believe i've already told you how to get em. don't sit back and wait for them to build a massive fleet unless your planning to tech right to destras. oh ya, scouts. build a lot of scouts. for some reason they can chew through LRFs. i didn't know that til my last game. funny how that works. your strategies that you figured might work...won't. defense are an alright counter to LRFs. not the best. they won't kill them fast enough before they cream your disciples so your gonna lose half your fleet. disciple+illums will be your best bet out of those three but your problem is, your focusing on only 2 ships. try illums+carriers+defense if anything. if you don't want to build carriers because they are too expensive, throw in scouts again. and stop being arrogant. why don't you go in and figure it out yourself like a lot of people have. its not that hard you know, play a game, so you lose it. oh well, make a new account.

Rofl ur funny.

I don't understand why illuminators suck ? I have been building fleets based on illuminators, the damage wasn't bad at all. They will focus fire. If i don't have defense vessels, i don't see the damage being spread out, they hit the main target, or maybe i'm wrong ? Do they hit for 1/3 of their nominal damage ? Didn't look like that to me. Please explain.

I'll tell you my experiences, i'm not a uber beta player so i may be lacking some experience, but here it goes.

In 1vs1 well, you're right after you take the first asteroid the fight begins. I go with a standard build and 2 temples of hostility. I also build the usual 2 seekers (which have this nice 200% damage to lrms should i need it), 1 cap (progenitor if i plan to stay defensive, halcyon for offense - the carrier has the most dps - fighters, aura bonus and damage all add up). Then i spam disciples until i hit the fleet cap, upgrade the laser for more damage, and from here it depends what the other player is doing. The LRM rush, if you have a progenitor with shield regen, and 10+ disciples with damage upgrade, you should survive (build more frigates/defenses, research the repair platform as soon as you see this coming). If you went with the halcyon, it should be level 2 at least (3 fighter squads), and you're fighting in his home base. I did this on the point blank map (7 systems - the 2 players are at 1 jump from each other). Once you have your halcyon and 11 disciples you go in. The TEC will still be building labs to get lrms. Kill frigates and key structures (frigate factory, labs). Ignore his capital until the frig factory is dead. If it's a sova planning to do embargo, kill it first of course. Might work on the standard small map, have to check the time it takes to get there. It's very important to research the right ship type and build it, based on what the enemy is doing. With 2 labs there's a choice between defense, drone and purge vessels (yes the bombers - if his home planet is undefended go bomb it).

In larger maps where i don't expect to be rushed (well if it's a large map it will take a long time for the hostiles to arrive), i go for the economy build (while still having the usual progenitor with 11 disciples). That means, 3 temples of harmony. I add more disciples after my second colony (doing the fleet logistic research), and the mothership should level up with pirats easily to level4. Then come trade centers, 3xtemples of hostility, illuminators/drone vessels/guardians. A few temples of communion placed at the most distant colonies to get the 10% allegiance bonus on all planets. Guardians + progenitor shield regen (if you did some nice leveling you have both 25% malice and 75shield/sec on the progenitor) is a very good defense in mid game, considering shield mitigation. On the dps side, i go with mainly illuminators to be used with malice spam. It's almost silly i focus on their caps, put malice on them, after the second cap dies, all frigates in malice range die too. Against massive LRM spammers the usual fighter/defense vessel stuff will work, that + malice/illum.

Capitals in large fleet battles become very vulnerable, basically you have to sacrifice them to get to use their abilites. This is true for all races, but i agree advent are somewhat weaker here.

Er? Normal small maps are 17-19 planets 1v1, wrt random maps with or without pirates. Maps like point blank, sure, past the asteroid there really isn't a point taking the ice planet but if your just taking the asteroid on 1v1 random maps then there is your problem why you think advent suck right there

Disciples + Illums suck (Illums come far to late + their dps is shitty).
The carrier approach wasnt very succesfull either (they just die like flies, are expensive and as soon as some cobalts are near them u have to jump them away if u dont want to lose them).
To me the Disciple+Defense Vessel approach is still the most viable (that doesnt mean that this one is better as a assailant/LRM strat).
What i found to be more useful early(the critical part), is to use the Revelation just because u can disable with the first point the enemy cap for the whole fight.
Although, the Radiance could be the better choice(more testing).

You can reasonably get 1 research ship (illum, carrier, or defense) + disciples + capital ship. 2 Research ships means a lot of additional starting income into research and no unit production, which means you're lagging badly on units.

As to why Illuminators seem to suck, they only do 1/3rd of their dps to single target, and they never fire all 3 beams unless your opponent is being an idiot.

Realistically, on premade small 1v1 maps, I don't think Advent survive. Defense vessel research takes too long, is too expensive, and you'll never get to illuminators in time. If you don't go disciples, you're too far behind on map control to do anything.

Everyone seems to advocate different builds.

One of my clanmates has had a lot of success with the carrier build, Erres seems to like the Illuminator build, and I personally like the defense build. But all 3 still seem weak to me.

Ok for one people are really not mentioning guardians... those things when teched up are amazing, the ability to push close combat units away is great! let your bombers deal with them 6 guardians microed to switch on the push one at a time is just incredible. with some defense frigs to cover the fighters and a horde of drone ships you have a moving untouchable factory... you can even take a few guardians out of the grav well and force a retreating player back into it.

advent are designed to be macroed... not zerged, time the abilities create a mini base within a grav well with guardians few defense frigs and subjecators... you can keep your main fleet repaired constantly and your support wont ever be harmed.

just my thoughts though.

If the enemy is going purely for a pure LRM rush, Seeker Vessels + Aeria Drone Hosts with Fighters may work. That gives you 1 researched ship(the Aeria) and the cheap Seekers which do 2x damage to LRMs and take only 1x from LRMs(unlike Disciples which take 1.5x). Then they would act as a cheap heavily-spammed meatshield doing some damage of their own but more importantly allow the Aerias to deploy their fighters without being chased. If the enemy managed to research flaks or brought anti-heavy Cobalts along, it may be required to bring Disciples too to counter the Cobalts and/or flak.

Early on, the Radiance would be a good cap-ship because it can deal with just about any early capital ship without needing much leveling up like the Progenitor and Halcyon, and at Level 2 it gets a squadron of it's own.

Guardians are Tier-3 like the Illuminator, but they're more expensive to build and have armor that Cobalts/Skirmishers are good against. And Repulsion is a Tier-5 upgrade, much later tech-wise than the OP is looking at. Domina Subjugators are also Tier-5, you might as well get Destras before them.