Advent Fleet Makeup

All you need are cap ships heavy cruisers and defense vessels.

Try 4:1 heavy cruisers to defense vessels with as many cap ships as possible.

The only thing that can counter your heavy cruisers are bombers which get torn to shreds before doing much of anything by a pittance of defense vessels, and heavy cruisers which you can out micro or out spam. A few shield support vessels are also useful.

A dozen Iconus ships coupled with a Progenitor and a score Light Frigates. There, your shields are pretty much guaranteed to never fall below 50%, together with antimatter. God, Advent is overpowered

Enemy support cruisers (Domina Subjugators and the TEC/Vasari equivalent) will make you cry.

Unfortunately the Advent don't have sufficient counters to cobalt/skirmisher units early game.

Since a skilled player will probably attack you early game, it's important to be able to handle any fleet early on.

Unless you plan on rushing to Crusaders, you've gotta get either a mix of defense vessels and deciples (although this will cause you to lose against a pure lrm rusher who has proper micro etc. in most cases), or to rush to illuminators while throwing in either some defense vessels or drone hosts.

Illuminators are slightly nerfed compared to the other long range ships, but, in large numbers, can actually perform as well or better than a large long range frigate lrm or assailant fleet, but only with proper micro.

Condition for using Illuminators #1: Have at least 20 of them, or more than your opponent has long range ships.

Condition for using Illuminators #2: Ram them down your opponent's throat.
Charge them INTO CLOSE RANGE! This will allow all 3 of their "arcs" to fire at once, tripling their effectiveness, especially in large fleets where having all of your ships target one ship at a time causes a lot of damage to be wasted.

While illuminators are fairly weak on their own, and i'm sure some shmuck who's convinced themselves that they are inferrior ships and would rather rush defense vessels or something like that (so terrible versus an lrm and cobalt fleet!.. defense vessels are too slow and lrms are really fast) will come here and attempt to put me in my place, if you want to ensure that your advent fleet doesn't fall victem to a "mid game massive 40 assailant or 60 lrm fleet".. you really should have some illuminators. Illuminators also dominate cobalt light frigates, which are the bane of advent fleets that don't have them.

Guardians are probably your best friends. With just a few of them who have repulsion you can keep your enemy's fleet separated and scattered allowing you to pick them off. I hate those things. Their the reason I gank advent players ASAP always.

I would make a similar fleet but substitute Illuminators for the heavy cruisers. I think they are far more effective for the cost and the first thing they will do without even being ordered to is kill the cap ships which can cause at least computer players to retreat. Now I just need Guardians with them and some support of their own and I can pick off ships at will as the Guardians disperse them all over the place. Other advantage is Illuminators are faster than all of the ships in the above mentions fleet and don't have to turn to be effective. Good range and with the Guardian push ability can be kept fairly safe.

Even if they get dispersed by enemy Guardians the recovery is faster and they won't have to turn to keep shooting everything in range... which is sizable.

I agree with italia559... experiment with a Illuminators also. Weak alone...massed they are wrong. Better for the cost than Advent heavy cruisers which have up to now failed to amuse me.



Also except in very long games you just won't be able to field all that many Capitol ships... the research is expensive and you will be over run long before you can get them going at... least vs. a human enemy. With a computer enemy it may be easier.

It's surprisingly easy to Destra Crusader rush with the advent. Granted, if you're being attacked you'll be best off trying to spam Defense Vessels and Illuminators, at maybe a 2:1 Defense:Illuminator ratio.

Once they start to leave you alone, it's not hard to build those 2 extra weapons labs, slowly pump out destras, and most times the enemy wont be ready for HC spam

Third Prophecy you've got the the right fleet composition but the wrong ratio: Try a 1:2 defense vessel:illuminator ratio.

This should work against most rushes as neither of those ships is bad against long range frigates, but having too few illuminators will result in losing all of your illuminators, allowing your opponent to then retreat, build up a ton of cobalts, and come back to get 'ye.