Hi archpsi could you do me a favour and test a situation for me, it's going to sound crazy but I hear the spreadsheets don't lie.

20 TEC LRM's VS 40 Advent Scouts

Scouts take up 2 pop, LRM's 4 so 2:1 sounds like the best match up.
Going by the 3:1 crystal/metal:Money rule you can buy 242% more scouts though.
Scouts get a 200% damage bonus V Light armour, LRM's get none against light

Scouts-Hull-Shield-Armour-DPS
200$---400---425-----2----3*2=6
LRM's
485$---500---280-----1----11
2 Scouts
400$---800---850-----2----12

So according to the spread sheet I got the scouts should kick the stuffing out of LRM's in a two to one encounter and are very cost effective. If your worried about having them hanging around to long at tech 4 you can get the suicide tech for them

Its certainly true that seekers beat LRM in a straight up fight on a cost-for-cost basis. Of course, LRM can do lots of things while seekers can do very few things in a battle.

I've beaten people doing LRM-spam with seekers in a "non competitive" game, but I would have won with many other tactics in those games...heh.

The fact is, defense vessels have better DPS against LRM than seekers (due to 3 guns) and they are better tanks, and they kill strikecraft...So their still superior to seekers as a LRM counter, at least in 1.03.

God knows, i'd rather have flak than scouts if my opponent upgrades from LRM to HC.

about scouts vs LRM's, heres the latest one I made.

1.428 seekers per javelin.
http://files.filefront.com/20scoutvs14javrecord/;9843925;/fileinfo.html

made this replay for another thread to prove that theres weapon/armour types and it shows that you do not need a ratio of 2 to 1.
I've made numerous replays of scouts vs lrms in the first few weeks, but they are usually not the best choice.

Cobalts/Lrms do not counter illuminators, but because relying on illuminators takes a great deal of micro and player skill to be worth while, most players don't bother with them. It is worth noting though that even my drone host tactic is countered by mass cobalts..

The only reason my strat against cobalts works at all is because drone hosts can "scatter" when the cobalts come after them, and because illuminators can do very good damage to cobalts while they are "chasing" the drone hosts. Also, if the cobalts chose not to chase the drone hosts, they will be squished by mass bombers which are pretty good against them.

ah, yes... the proven strategy of theorycrafting

To all the PRO Advent players.

I'm a poor newb who wants to learn how to beat Tec with Advent.

Please teach me via 1v1s. We can post replays after so that the community can see how you beat Tec with Advent. It will be great. You can show me how awesome the illuminator counter is. How great and powerful drone carriers are against cobalts.

Remember, I'm just a no-name scrub who sucks at Sins. You'll DEFINITELY win. Definitely.

It's not theorycrafting, it's the game engine. Fighters only do 25% damage against cobalts. It's ok not to know that right away, but try not to act smug about your own ignorance.

lol HuntingX, I don't think you can convince the community that you're a noob no matter how hard you try. =P

I am no pro by a long shot, but everytime i've used the illum/drone host counter to mass cobalts i've won. Now the question is, were my opponents good. The answer to this is probably not. I have yet to try this strategy out against a player of equal skill level. Again, I am certainly not a pro.. but I have a lot of games under my belt.

The safer bet is to do as you've said and just get a ton of deciples, or to rush to destra crusaders, but I want to stress that illuminators will be better in 1.04 and then the illum thing will be more worth while.

Also, I bet someone has posted on how to properly micro illuminators.

Even in 1.03 they are decent if you ram them into your opponent so that they can fire all 3 arcs at once.

Oh and Tsear is in fact 100% right about fighters doing only 25% damage to cobalts. It's on the handy damage chart located at the top of the strategy forum. If you go drone hosts versus bombers you're in for risky business and you have to be very careful and keep good micro, but you can certainly win if you have enough illuminator backup. You need bombers for this though, and not fighters, obviously.

I'm not sure what Ironclad was thinking when they designed advent with no Anti-Medium counter. Basically, a entire fleet of cobalts can reck havok on the advent because there is no possible way to counter them. Sure you can say malice+cleansing brilliance can destroy them but it requires you to get one of your ships to level 6. Which is highly unlikely with a cobalt rush. Whats even more interesting is the fact that cobalts are starter ships you get by default. And they can destroy every last advent unit with relative ease.

They are the best ship for performance and cost at this time. Disciples pale in comparison even with steal anti matter. While 1.04 will make advent have a anti-medium counter unit it really doesn't matter since Illuminators are tech 3. Which again will require you to work extremely hard to counter a unit that is there by default. By the time you get the resources to make 3 Hostility temples and the resources to actually make a Illuminator fleet, you will already be dead or damn near it. If advent had a good starting economy then maybe getting to Tech 3 and forming a fleet of illuminators quickly would be likely. However, their economy blows just as bad as their military blows and just has bad as the Culture blows. Which in turn leaves advent ripe for raping by TEC and Vasari players.

At this time there is no distinct advantage advent has over any of the two factions besides their voices sounding cool. To be honest, I don't even understand why advent are in the game.

defense vessels against lrms. you guys are nuts.

The problem is that cobalts + lrms counters anything Advent can produce, including disciples and defense vessels (obviously, i'm not taking into account HC's which counter everything - I'm simply talking early game)

tihs is troll talk, absolutly untrue. LRMs are tech 2 thus advent has dronehosts but you need to got to iconus right away to defend the dronehosts against focus fire. Then it works. In 1.04 this doesnt matter anymore cause dronehosts can run circles away from lrms
and btw: hcs dont counter everything.

You can even beat LRMs alone with Scouts....although scouts needs to be micromanaged cause the dont attack by themselfs which is kinda crap, anyone knwo if you can switch this?

Iconus... works wonders, just make sure the shield is up before the TEC sabotaces the reactor but by then your discples should be able to absorb the cobalts antimatter to fill up the Iconus and you cap ships.

Currently drone hosts are worthless when trying to kill a fleet or defend (they have their uses for raiding, though). All I'd do is build some flak to completely negate your drone hosts at nearly a 4:1 ratio. Doesn't matter if your drone hosts can do circus acrobatics, I'm just going to ignore them and concentrate on relieving your of your structures/cap. LRM's main objective is simply to kill your cap, structures, and light frigates anyways. Guardians are also tier 3 and have research prereqs. Furthermore, they are expensive and can be countered by **moving your fleet around. If you have a lot of guardians, your offensive ability is a lot weaker than someone who dedicated their resources to offense. Someone massing LRMs just needs to fly them past your bubble and force you to move your ships and rebubble. You'll run out of antimatter quickly.

Flak completely shuts down carriers. If you micro the flak blob to either stay close to the lrms or even better, to go in between the lrm and the carriers, their fighters get completely chewed up before doing very much. LRM's ordinance cannot be stopped. Fighter/bombers ARE the carriers' ordinance. That's their problem. Right now, advent has no choice but to get defense vessels. In a 1v1 fight against a lrm spammer, that's the only unit that can beat lrms even though they kill slowly.

Disciples' drain antimatter is not even that good unless you're up against swarms of units with antimatter like light frigs. The reason is that yes, they drain, but it costs them 100 antimatter to transfer it to another unit. Most of the time, when they're all draining willy-nilly, they end up with 30 here and 40 there. And that only applies against fleets of ships with lost of antimatter. LRM's don't have antimatter plus they counter your disciples.

You also need to stop thinking about only fleet vs fleet combat. The trouble with lrm blobs that have reached critical mass is that it's incredibly hard to stop them from razing your structures and killing your cap. Their damage type is the most valuable in the early/mid game and they outrange anything. Plus, they're faster than cap ships, so you can't run from them. The last point will obviously change in the upcoming version making it much harder to kill caps with lrm blobs. There's nothing the advent can get early game that can stop lrm's assault. People are suggesting defense vessels because lrms have a hard time killing them and in a long dragged out fight, defense vessels will win. Once defense vessels have reached the critical mass, they drop lrms like flies and multiple at a time. However, the problem with the defense vessels is that when you get lrm rushed/spammed, you're not going to have many of them, as they're only good against lrms (thus, it would be silly to mass them if the opponent was massing say, cobalts). Thus, when the lrm rush comes, it's unlikely you'll have reached the critical mass for your defense vessels to really stop the lrms from killing your cap and structures then leaving.

The illum buff (MASSIVE buff) will at least give advent the ability to counter lrm with even better lrm. Sure, illums won't win 1v1 against lrms, but an illum fleet can beat an lrm fleet. I'm suspecting that illums will be "THE" great spam unit of 1.04. Their overall damage has gone up (from 33.8 to 39 avg) assuming their rate of fire isn't changed, their front bank now deals double damage, and they got a buff to their shields and hull. As a tradeoff, they cost one additional lab, hardly something that will lose you the game unless you and your opponent start off as neighbours.

Scouts come with AutoAttack turned off, it can be toggled by the button in the lower left of the scout's little menu (right below Auto-Explore). Although last I checked HuntingX soundly defeated someone trying to use Scouts to counter LRMs, so it's not a strategy I would hang my hat on. If you can beat him though with Scout spam (or Drone Hosts) that would make for an interesting replay.

With that said, LRMs are T2, same with Drone Hosts but Drone Hosts can be countered by one of the most cost effective hard counters in the game, Flak Frigates. Most players mix some flak in with LRMs to give an edge in the LRM vs LRM fights that dominate most games, but against strikecraft the things are insanely cost effective. A single flak can fairly easily counter two Drone Hosts, and costs half the Metal and Crystal.

On top of that, Drone Hosts cost twice that of the Javelis LRM. So for the same cost, they can counter your drone hosts and have LRMs to murder your Disciples. Drone Hosts can be effective in large numbers, particularly if you can kill the Flak first, but TEC has a hard counter (the LRM) to the only unit you could use to go after the Flak early game (the Disciple).

Guardians are wonderful little units, but pricey (effectively as much as a Heavy Cruiser) and for the cost of the prerequisite research a TEC can get up the additional Military Research to begin the Kodiak fun. Heavy Cruisers don't counter everything, but anything you have early in the game will get eaten alive unless you can get up Guardian's Repulsion research (which, like the Heavy Cruisers, is T5 but the Guardian research will set you back a ways).

The trouble is, as has been stated, that TEC has a rock hard counter to everything Advent can produce early in a game. Disciples? LRMs. Flak? Cobalts. Drone Hosts? Flak.

But Advent lacks that same hard counter ability as them, because they miss the crucial LRM. This means that they have to instead of fighting Rock with Paper, they have to fight Rock with Rock, and outproduce them. This takes away the initiative, which is really the first step to losing.

I love Advent and would love to be proven wrong though. So if you could post some replays of beating good TECs with these strategies (or arrange a match with one of them for us to see) it could be a good experience for everyone, I think.

And I'll be greatly disappointed if Jinx is right and the only effective change in 1.04 makes it so Advent can counter the boring LRM spam with LRM spam of it's own. Or worse, becomes popular because of. The units are seriously fundamentally flawed, their entire role needs to be re-examined and it's impact on the meta-game, not just tweaking it's speed stats and such.

@bajong



Before you go running off screaming "troll! troll!", You should actually learn the definition of the word in internet context. Also, ad hominem attacks (implying my post was created for the intent to troll) don't serve well to backup your arguments.



Let me be more specific then. HC's, with a small amount of support ships and flak, counter any other fleet configuration except the Advent Super Fleet (which relies on its cap combo anyways).

carriers, a unit you seem to love, are completely shut down with a small amount of flak tossed in.

I said just HC's to simplify, as they'd be the ones dealing damage. I assumed I wouldn't have to spell it - it should be pretty obvious I was being general. Oh well, I've already accepted that some people need a little more hand-holding than others.



Scouts are very silly to use as anything but a last ditch effort to fend off LRM's. Even Advent souts, which are the best of the three. They can't kill the LRM's as fast as the LRM's kill your cap and structures. Once that happens, the lrm player leaves and then sends in a wave of coblats, which you can do nothing about.

its hard to take out a lrm blob but you are not taking the dynamic of countermeasures into account. As soon as i start doing anything that the opponent has to counter, fighter/bombers for example he has to build defense vessels, thus less lrms. And personally i didnt find defense vessels very effective. Especially not against bombers, which can chew up caps quite fast. 4:1 is exaggerated.
They seem to be a bit strong against fighters though. I dont know if a benefit or a disadvantage of advent fighters that they have so many drones.

I aggree that a lrm blob with defense vessel cover is hard to crack. but there are ways.

And drone hosts are not useless... i fought many battle and won with them,especially against players massing kodiacs. once you get up to the 20+ numbers it gets really neat.

I still dont know why you deny the scouts as a viable counter to lrms. They are dirt cheap and have same life & shields as a deciple and similiar damage to the lrm.On top they are fast. Can close in to the LRMS quickly. And if you actually can conserve some of them get martyrdom later and crash em into some stuff.
Now you could argue that he builds more cobalts then. Then two units are involved on both sides and the player needs to strike a balance there. The better balance wins i guess.
I dont like defense vessels cause you are stuck with a unit that gets chewed up by light frigates (like the scout) and ( thats the but) it cost a bit up research and other resources besides money. These resources can be used for pushing tech level up.

I mentioned the abilitiy of the disciple for the reason to prevent sabotaging the Iconus reactors. but well, thats even further out in the tree. As well as the absorb ability itself. Probably both players wont have any of them.


You cant use a suprise scenario for a balance issue.

Thus, when the lrm rush comes, it's unlikely you'll have reached the critical mass for your defense vessels to really stop the lrms from killing your cap and structures then leaving.

I could do the same thing on the advent side. secrely massing lots and lots of dronehosts with fighters and when he attacks he has no defense vessels. Which would look quite bad for him. that just doesnt say anything about unit balance. its only about player skill.

The speed advantage of the lrm is quite annonying though. Hunting down caps doesnt make it fun. but thats been fixed in 1.04 hopefully.


You wont hit critical mass early in the game :

You also need to stop thinking about only fleet vs fleet combat. The trouble with lrm blobs that have reached critical mass is that it's incredibly hard to stop them from razing your structures and killing your cap.

When i gets that far the advent has other units available.

edit: ill look through my replays to see if i find anything where i have been fighting lrms and see if there was a decent TEC player behind. If not,i guess my experience is quite biased.

I didn't say anything about a surprise scenario. You build flak in response to seeing lrms being massed. In other words, you would have less than optimal flak as you're doing it as a reactionary counter. Furthermore, a balanced fleet of cobalts and lrms will rip apart a balanced fleet of disciples and flak.

you guys are forgetting that the advent are insane when a fleet is paired up with the mothership and the cruisers. They have an aura which causes ships to get hurt if they attack it. I personally thnk the advent is a formidible force especially when i have a fleet with 20 disicples and 20 illuminators, 10 desolace (or w/e its callled) cruisers and take out a fleet of 2 TEC battleships, 40 cobalts, 20, LRM, and 15 kodiak cruisers. Just looking at the stats zoomed out is crazy..the enemies shield and HP go down way fast because of the advents aura

Jinx, just give up...I have =p. Leave people with their misconceptions, eventually they will lose to people without them enough times that they get broken anyway.

Soulassadr, advent does fine once you have high level caps, have time to tech up to crusaders, etc...however, if your playing against good players, you'll need to fight WAY before you have the time to tech up that high. Have I won with advent? Of course. Does that mean advent aren't handicapped? No, I just beat up on people who don't know what their doing. If i'm playing against an equally skilled player and I have advent, I'm in trouble right now in 1.03. Advent just doesn't do well in 1v1 right now. Team games help mitigate some of Advent's problems because your allies can "protect" you till you get the higher technology and your synergies going...

-Drexion

p.s. argh, I ended up doing what Jinx was doing above and explaining...dammit!

They're called destra crusaders. What you described is similar to the Advent Super Fleet alluded to above. The super fleet's bread and butter combo is brilliance + malice.

The thing is, the advent superfleet can't be amassed before the LRM rush. Also, Crusaders are HC's which is something that has already been addressed as a great unit but not something you can realistically get to stop an LRM rush. It's like trying to stop a ling rush with ultralisks.

if you dont have enough of them, you have been suprised cause you discovered to late that he is spamming lrms. doesnt that qualify for a suprise? so if you say he doesnt have enough, he has been suprised by it.

yes i like strikecraft cause they are very versatile and fast.

@redmaw, yeah that makes sense. Thus i always push the tech level to 3 right away. its not that expensive to get there. You need to combine units to make the best out of advents units. There is no ignorant way to deal with this.
Doesnt the TEC has to invest a bit into civil research to get a spam going? Which eco is needed to supply this?

Maybe the guy with the scouts didnt use em right. Fleets gets chewed up if there inital strength is not high enough, you know that. Getting them in one by one never really works.
2:1 is neccessary and you do the same as the lrms, ff them one by one. It tried it, it works. 10lrms are taken out by 20 scouts. 40 by 80 scouts it work regardless the numbers. Id say the higher the numbers the scouts are even in favour, cause they have higher fire rate thus spreading damage out better.

I think the biggest abuse scenario comes into play if you guys use numbers like 80 lrms and then say they kill a cap ship in no time... obviously. and due to their speed the cap can run away. But if you get that much units. or even say 40. thats still a high number for the games i play.(Never actually saw more than ~60 althougher).
Cant you argue against all these extreme numbers that you just push up to destras? i mean how many lrms do you need to take one destra down?

You dont even need the malice+brilliance combo. It works allready on tech 3 where you have illus, iconus, disciples and dronhosts + a mostership with shield regen.

@Drex - yeah i know... I always get suckered into these theorycrafting talks...

Until 1.04, if I'm LRM rushing, you better have Radiance. Any other cap ship (especially the slow mothership) is going down before it can contribute much. This is why your fleet will not work. You won't even get to really build up the mothership before it dies.

Anyways, enough theorycrafting. I can demonstrate the LRM rush to you if you want. However, the game will change quite a bit after 1.04 so it effectively makes this whole conversation moot.

Bajong I'm confident you haven't spent time playing Advent or you never had a good TEC player rush you with Cobalts and LRMs. You won't ever get a chance to get Iconus, because you will be spending resources rebuilding structures and building new units to replace destroyed ones.

Drone hosts do nothing against LRMs. They are too feeble to stand against them and the strike craft isn't effective enough to act as a effective counter. Plus you won't ever be able to put out equal numbers compared to LRMs at the beginning of the game due to advents economy being poor. So you might have a few constructed but it won't be enough to act as a real counter.

What you are saying essentially works on paper only or against AI or players who choose to let you camp and build up. That is not the problem, the problem is being rushed by Cobalts and LRMs. I guarantee you that you won't make it to tech 3 and if you some how did early you won't have the resources to backup your production and will still get owned by TEC and Vasari rushes. Its inevitable, no matter how you are trying to spin things to make it seem that advent players are doing to the wrong tactics.

Yes I'm sure 20 scouts might be able to take out 10 LRMS. And of course that scenario is not realistic because it would have to be where the TEC player isn't using cap ships or cobalts. In a real game, a swarm of cobalts would be putting missiles in the seeker units butt. Thus 20 seekers would be downed to 0 in no time and putting you in the same position you started, which is getting raped.

guess i only played noobs then.



arent both economies the same same in the beginning?

Bajong, thats what most people on ICO are frankly... Not surprising . As frogboy said in his 1.04 post a day or two ago, the whole issue of balance changes drastically based upon the player's experience/skill level.

For the vast majority of people, the issues Jinx raises just don't apply right now. Its my opinion though that over time the online community will "progress", just look at the player-skill average on battlenet for starcraft for example.

The main reason Jinx is able to raise these issues is that we've been doing many inhouse games on IRC with other people on the "cutting edge" of the metagame. Thus we run into these balance issues frequently .

I love the advent and thats that! TEC is ok but LRM or not they will lose against a smart advent player.